The White House blog announced a new open data policy for government-held data.

“President Obama signed an Executive Order directing historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth. Under the terms of the Executive Order and a new Open Data Policy released today by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget, all newly generated government data will be required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, greatly enhancing their accessibility and usefulness, while ensuring privacy and security.”

While the policy doesn’t mention adding semantic markup to enhance machine understanding, calling for machine-readable datasets with persistent identifiers is a big step forward.