Open data in the United States

In the 1970s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began releasing weather information, which could now be called "open data".

[1] After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace,[2] in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making the United States Global Positioning System of Air Force Space Command, freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.

[5] United States government weather data is the base of an industry which generates US$30 billion annually.

[13] data.gov is a U.S. government website launched in late May 2009 by the then Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States, Vivek Kundra.

According to its website, "The purpose of data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.