United States / 2013 87% open

Census.gov has data on a wide variety of national statistics including all major demographic and economic indicators (population, GDP etc etc). Tabular data is generally provided in machine-readable formats such as Excel (an open format such as CSV would be preferable but we still consider this acceptable). The data is also available "in bulk" in the sense that ther e are complete files plus data is available via automated access on an FTP site at http://www2.census.gov/ (where CSV files are often available). One point to note is that there are other sources of such data within the US government including the Bureau of Economic Analysis (http://bea.gov), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://bls.gov/) etc.

The US Census provide zip-code centroids as part of their 2010 Gazetteer located at: http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/gazetteer2010.html. The URL in this submission is the link to the specific zip file containing these centroids (along with other information) in in tab-delimted (TSV) format.

There is a very substantial amount of geographic information openly provided by the US Government. The most relevant to this specific question is probably the US Census' TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) Database which provides vector data covering features such as "Boundaries, roads, address information, water features, and more". In addition to TIGER there is also substantial geographic data available from the US Geological Survery (USGS) at: http://www.usgs.gov/pubprod/. This includes topographic maps as well as aerial and satellite imagery (such as the global Landsat data).

The link provided is to bulk XML data for United States Code provided by Office of the Law Revision Counsel for US House of Representatives. Data made available since July 2013 (see this announce http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/opengov-house-representatives-makes-us-code-available-bulk-xml). Regarding open licensing we assume that the US Code is public domain. In addition no copyright assertion is mentioned on the site and the congress.gov site is run by the Library of Congress and one would anticipate is subject to standard public domain provisions (though there is a legal section whose copyright portion is unfortunately rather unenlightening - http://beta.congress.gov/legal/#copyright) There is a variety of additional (machine-readable) data from a variety of sources not least the new Congress.gov website (which will be completely replacing http://thomas.loc.gov/ from November 2013). Other resources include: - Bulk data from the GPO in XML format including Congressional Bills, Commerce Business Daily etc. (Does not seem to be updated since Jan 2013). Announced Jan 10 2013 - see http://www.gpo.gov/pdfs/news-media/press/13news01.pdf - The full US Code on the GPO at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collectionUScode.action?collectionCode=USCODE (PDF) - The Federal Register https://www.federalregister.gov/ which includes "Regulations are issued by federal agencies, boards, or commissions [which] explain how [an] agency intends to carry out a law." (Data is provided in HTML, CSV and JSON and there is a full API - see https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1 and https://www.federalregister.gov/blog/learn/developers) - Resources listed on http://speaker.gov/open including http://docs.house.gov/ (which includes XML versions of laws being considered) and House floor activities at http://clerk.house.gov/floorsummary/floor-download.aspx In addition it is worth noting various unofficial sites that provide excellent material such as: - https://www.govtrack.us/ - http://opencongress.org/ It may also be interesting to read how expensive some of this material once was, see e.g. Carl Malamud's comments in http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/bulk-data-downloads-government-transparency-breakthrough.html

Additional data can be easily accessed through the Data.gov Energy community at http://Energy.data.gov. The primary datasets with this material are the Toxic Release Inventory, but other datasets provide insight to additional environmental pollutants. Air pollution data exists at the given link. As the data is provided from federal websites and is therefore public domain (at least in the US) we consider it openly licensed.

Data prior to 2004 is not machine readable although recent results are; marked as "machine readable" as this is the present data and direction of travel. Numbers are for "primary, runoff and general election results for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives and, when applicable, U.S. President." They are "obtained from each state’s election office and other official sources." Raw data for the 2000, 2004, and 2008, 2012 Presidential General Elections are also available through the National Atlas.

Current budget is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/. Formal budget documents are in PDF format and are on http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Overview. Machine-readable data in Excel and CSV files can be found in the supplemental material at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Supplemental. In terms of the open license, given this is Federal data one would anticipate this is public domain. Furthermore, the Whitehouse.gov copyright notice states all material is CC-By (see http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright). Comments: - Bulk: Whilst the data is split across multiple files there is an good core set of data in the "Public Budget Database" which consists of only 3 substantial CSV files. As such, have marked Bulk as "Yes" - Machine-readable: whilst formal budget is PDF we believe that all relevant data is contained in the Excel and CSV files so Machine-readable is "Yes" (note also that the CSV files are well formatted) - Older budgets: the OMB budget site only contains data for the latest budget with past budgets available on the GPO website at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collectionGPO.action?collectionCode=BUDGET. The GPO site only provides PDFs. However, the OMB site does contain a historical tables section at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals and the Public Budget Database contains data back to 1962.

The data at USASpending.gov accounts for only a fraction of all government spending, and it is organized in a way that makes it hard to understand and use. So while it's open data, it's only a small part of federal spending data. It does not include expenses on government salaries and operating expenditures or information on Medicare, the nation's government sponsored medical insurance for the elderly (~20% of total spending). There are no government-wide spending records that would actually be more helpful --- that is, the government doesn't collect the type of data about its own spending that would be useful to the open government world.

Transportation data is available from the US Department of Transportation at http://www.data.gov/list/agency/35/* and more at the Data.gov Safety community at http://safety.data.gov. This includes transportation venues, locations, safety records, on-time arrivals, etc. http://data.gov However this question is about national bus and train timetables which are harder to find. There is also a question as to whether in the US national bus and train are in fact government or privately run.

In the US, corporate registration happens at the state level. The timeliness, availability, and licensing of this data varies among all 50 states. There is no federal dataset that contains all corporate registrations. It would be possible to create a unified open registry for all US corporations (even if only via aggregation from state ones) but this does not exist at this time