http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/wired-o-nomics.html
A new measure will promote "…a less-noted type of economic infrastructure: government data. In the name of transparency, all the Fed’s stimulus-spending data will be posted at a new government site, http://Recovery.gov,"according to a Wired-O-Nomics story. Because the data will be released in machine-readable formats, like RSS, XML, and KML, it will be possible for businesses to use it to do business, so the data will become part of the stimulus for our ailing economy.
The open data will spawn new uses, and "…the unforeseeable nature of data-driven innovation is exactly the point. “It’s a little bit like if we were sitting in the Soviet Union in the mid-’80s, and somebody said ‘What if we had an open market? What kind of businesses would we see?’” he says. “It’s the nature of the benefits here that they are hard to predict.”
Barbara K Iverson 