By now, we've all seen the horrific pictures and videos of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its repercussions, but few of us know the myriad numbers behind the spill.
As part of the White House's Open Government Initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy has opened an online portal for the public to learn heart-wrenching details about the oil spill, technical descriptions of the oil well, factors that lead to its malfunction and how some of the solutions were/are supposed to work. The site offers plenty of data for everyone to peruse, including schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the ill-fated blowout preventer.
On the website, Energy Secretary Steven Chu says the department wants to be more transparent than a solar-cell filled window. As he says, "Transparency is not only in the public interest, it is part of the scientific process. We want to make sure that independent scientists, engineers and other experts have every opportunity to review this information and make their own conclusions."
But unless you are an amateur engineer looking to stop the oil spill yourself, you'll probably have a hard time deciphering the data sets.
That is, if you even get to the charts. Instead of publishing every chart and data set on its website, you have to download the files onto your computer to read them.
If you're like me, you probably don't download PDF and XLS files that a website tries to put on your computer's desktop. If I weren't an intrepid journalist working on assignment, I probably wouldn't have made my computer's desktop any more cluttered with these files. The DoE should publish these data sets in the more easily accessible HTML format.
But I'm a man of action, not just complaints, so I uploaded one of the DoE's files to Google Spreadsheets to demonstrate how easy it is to open this data to the largest audience possible.
The entire effort to stop the oil spill hasn't been very transparent up to this point, so I take this web page as a sign that the DoE is moving in the right direction. Now, if they could just get the oil under control.
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