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Excerpt from pages 41-42 of President Obama’s budget for 2015.  The full document is available here.

By opening up Government-generated assets including data and the fruits of federally funded research and development (R&D) — such as intellectual property and scientific publications — to the public, Government can empower individuals and businesses to significantly increase the public’s return on investment in terms of innovation, job creation, and economic prosperity.

Opening Data to Spark Innovation.

The Administration has placed a high priority on transparency and, in particular, on opening Government data as fuel for private sector innovation and public use. Since 2009, the Administration has released tens of thousands of data sets to the public while protecting individual privacy, on everything from credit card complaints, to weather and climate measurements, to what different hospitals charge for different procedures. The use of this data has resulted in new start-up companies and ventures, creating jobs and driving innovation. Private companies have used Government data sets to bring transparency to retirement plans, help consumers find deceptive, erroneous, and fraudulent charges on their credit and debit card bills, and increase crop yields and address climate change by enabling rapid adaptations in crop selection and management. By continuing investments in open data, the Administration supports efforts to unlock Federal data sets with a high potential for economic impact, including in the areas of healthcare, energy, education, public safety, tourism, and agriculture.