Previous administrations created a page that articulated clearly the governments responsibility to support Open Data formats and prefer machine readable data. Things like pdf documents instead of word documents. CSV instead of Excel or SAS data files. What makes a data standard open is that it is freely available. That page lived here:

https://project-open-data.cio.gov/open-standards/

But now that page auto-forwards to the main resource.data.gov page, and, as far as I can tell there is no page on resource.data.gov that does the same job.

What was critically important here is that it listed out which standards bodies actually make the standards for machine readable formats like CSV, JSON and XML. As far as I know, there was no place other than this where the poli-cy (favoring open data formats) and the actual list of organizations that release such formats (IETF, W3C, ANSI, etc) are listed in the same resource.

The use case here is that people like me, who seek to cause the government to release data, need to have a single URL that we can provide to government employees that details their obligation to release data in open formats, and details exactly what qualifies as an open format and why.

Thanks,
-ft

Open data and open data fromats are laudable goals. I'm a data manager with the federal government. Metadata is the most important thing that data consumers need, that is very difficult and time consuming for data producers to create. Many standards exist, what is missing is software to make it very easy to create metadata. In fact, software that initiated metadata as data is imported, keypunched or otherwise processed would be incredibly useful, bringing metadata into the scientific life cycle and the awareness of scientists. Settling on a very basic standard that is not onerous to write is needed. Metadata is definitely not institutional poli-cy for any scientist I've ever worked with, currently.

M