Now that Data.gov’s out, I thought I’d take a look under the hood and see what’s in there, what’s missing, and try and figure out what’s coming.

First off searching through twitter for the phrase “Data.gov congratulations” I’m able to get enough evidence that hmiller23 and Jerad Speigel of the Phase One Consulting Group built the site. I asked them on Twitter, and they said “It Uses LAMP”

Right now the site is short on data. Federal CIOs: There are hundreds of us waiting to do interesting things with your data. Invest in putting it up on Data.gov now. You will be rewarded.

Right now the breakdown of the files looks like this:

In terms of number of datasets per agency, here’s what we’re looking at:

So the US Geological Survey represents roughly half the data (which also may be why the available datasets are in KML or ESRI).

That’s the thing that really must change now– and that’s going to be what will determine the success of Data.gov. There’s a lot of datasets that the federal government has that have not been included, big datasets like the FACA Database, the FARA Database, and what about OMB’s own Federal Budget?

But that’s not stopping us. Already– in less than 24 hours, we have one entry to the contest. Go ahead and play FBI Fugitive Concentration!