In a paper going around quite rapidly, researchers argue that the government should move to emphasize structured, reusable data over solely user-facing Web portals. From Ars Technica:
A new paper from researchers at Princeton University suggests a different strategy. David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten, all of Princeton’s Information Technology Policy Center, suggest that government officials abandon the dream of developing usable web sites, and instead focus on providing raw public data such as regulatory decisions, Congressional votes, and campaign finance data in open, structured formats such as RSS and XML. This raw data would be made freely and publicly available to anyone who wanted it and could be used for any purpose.