> These indexes, if developed and maintained properly by the agencies, will reveal a vast trove of government information to the public.
However, even just having a straight-up list of what exists is a really good start...a lot of data (and information in general) is not really kept secret, it's just obscure.
A great data anecdote comes to mind, from an investigation that found Florida police officers with severe misconduct charges were continually employed. The records of their misconduct were public record, in a SQL database, but reporters didn't previously know about it, and the agency who kept such data...well, it's not their job to monitor it:
http://ire.org/blog/on-the-road/2011/12/20/behind-story-trac...
> The misconduct database was the big thing. It had multiple tables in it. Then there was a separate employee database, which was a state-wide database. It’s basically like a glorified rolodex. (The state) is in charge of certification, which is why they keep the database. There is a form that officers have to fill out if they change jobs or departments. It is the cleanest set of data I have ever worked with. There was no big clean up with the data. Sometimes you get a data set and find out it has errors or wrong information. Everywhere we turned this data pointed us correctly.
> This was a case where the government had this wonderful, informative dataset and they weren’t using it at all except to compile the information. I remember talking to one person at an office and saying: “How could you guys not know some of this? In five minutes of (SQL) queries you know everything about these officers?” They basically said it wasn't their job. That left a huge opportunity for us.
At least with an index of datasets, you can grep it for something like "misconduct" or "inspection" or "investigation" and start from there.