Interagency Technical Advisory Group

The focus of the interagency Technical Advisory Group (iTAG) is to provide a forum for Federal agency and entity coordination on operational requirements and insights on how to maximize access to scientific and technical data in keeping with the February 2013 OSTP Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research¹ and OMB Open Data Policy (M-13-13² ) memoranda. The objective is to improve the public's ability to locate and access appropriate digital assets while enabling proper long-term stewardship of these assets by optimizing archival functionality, and (where appropriate) leveraging existing institutional repositories, public and academic archives, as well as community and discipline-based repositories of scientific and technical data, software, and publications. By providing better and more meaningful access to data, business leaders will be better equipped with meaningful information so that they can make better decisions, the public can better understand government services and products, and the economy can derive new untapped value from federal government data.

Members of the iTAG are Federal employees participating in their individual capacity as subject matter experts and providing their own perspectives from a range of agency and entity settings including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Census Bureau, the Department of Energy, the Department of Treasury, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Smithsonian.

Among the goals of the iTAG is to develop a pilot for a Common Access Platform (CAP) to demonstrate feasibility and to allow agencies to evaluate a common technical approach for interoperable access. The iTAG expects to produce working documents for describing Use Cases and Requirements for CAP, including persistent identifier information types and users and systems access requirements. When available, these documents will be posted on this web site.

For questions, please contact itaginfo [at] nist.gov (itaginfo[at]nist[dot]gov).

Participating Organizations
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Coordinator (Chair)
Census Bureau
Department of Energy
Department of Treasury
National Archives and Records Administration
National Institutes of Health
Smithsonian
U.S. Department of Agriculture

¹ http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf

² http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2013/m-13-13.pdf