The Open Data Initiative, an effort to make government data machine-readable and accessible to all citizens.

FORBES: New York Tech-Worthy

Examples of data that are already being released in machine-readable form across government.

FORBES: Obama Signs Open Data Executive Order: U.S. Government Data To Be Made Freely Available

Similarly, the Green Button team at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is working collaboratively with industry to enable millions of residential and commercial energy customers to securely download and share their own energy usage data in a standardized human-readable and machine-readable format directly from their utilities.

WHITEHOUSE: Presidential Innovation Fellows

Recognizing that simply publishing snapshots of government information is not enough to make it open, we need to improve the quality, accessibility, timeliness, and usability of our data and content through well-defined standards that include the use of machine-readable formats such as web APIs and common metadata tagging schemas.

WHITEHOUSE: Digital Government