The Department of Commerce (DOC) is looking for input on the development of AI-ready open data assets and data dissemination standards, according to a new request for information (RFI) posted on April 17.
The new RFI is seeking comments from industry through July 16 on producing and disseminating high-quality public data that can help the department enable U.S. scientific discovery, innovation, and economic growth.
“Thus far, Commerce has made efforts to expose its public data through structured [Application Programming Interface] (API)s and is developing enriched metadata standards for describing its data assets,” the Commerce Department said.
“To date, Commerce metadata has focused on enabling the discovery of data assets rather than the use of those data assets by AI systems, but Commerce sees value in changing this focus. Commerce seeks to further understand how it can make its data assets AI-ready,” the agency said.
Some of the areas that the RFI is seeking information on include adopting data formats that allow for rich metadata as well as generating “sidecars for more traditional formats such as CSV or SAS,” and using open standards for APIs that have the ability to link knowledge graphs.
Additionally, they agency wants to improve guidance and metadata around appropriate data usage and licensing for purposes that will increase research analytics, text-and-data mining, and AI system ingestion.
“The challenge for Commerce, as an authoritative provider of data, is to ensure that these new AI intermediaries can appropriately access its data without losing the integrity, including quality, of said data,” the agency said.
