[Federal Register Volume 87, Number 115 (Wednesday, June 15, 2022)]
[Notices]
[Pages 36151-36152]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2022-12510]
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DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
[Agency Docket Number: DOL-2022-0003]
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy; Request for
Information on Design and Implementation Features for Open Data
Services Provided by the Department of Labor
AGENCY: Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Department of
Labor.
ACTION: Request for information.
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SUMMARY: The Department is seeking public input in support of its open
data efforts to ensure that expanding public access to Federal data
will best reflect public interests, serve public needs, and continue to
be customer focused, while protecting the confidentiality of its data
providers.
DATES: Written comments must be submitted through the Federal
eRulemaking Portal as described below on or before December 12, 2022.
ADDRESSES: You may submit electronic comments in the following way:
Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov. Follow the
instructions for submitting comments. Comments submitted
electronically, including attachments, to https://www.regulations.gov
will be posted to the docket unchanged. Because your comment will be
made public, you are solely responsible for ensuring that your comment
does not include any confidential information that you or a third party
may not wish to be posted, such as personally identifying information,
your or anyone else's Social Security number, or confidential business
information, such as a manufacturing process. Please note that if you
include your name, contact information, or other information that
identifies you in the body of your comments, that information will be
posted on https://www.regulations.gov.
Instructions: All submissions received must include the Docket No.
DOL-2021-0005 for ``Request for information on design and
implementation features for open data services provided by the
Department of Labor.'' Received comments, those filed in a timely
manner (see DATES), will be placed in the docket and be publicly
viewable at https://www.regulations.gov.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Scott Gibbons, Chief Data Officer,
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, U.S. Department of Labor,
200 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20210,
[email protected], 202-693-5075 (this is not a toll-free number),
or for individuals with hearing or speech impairments, 1-877-889-5627
(this is the TTY toll-free Federal Information Relay Service number).
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
I. Background
The Department of Labor (Department) is committed to fostering a
strong, open data policy that provides simple and meaningful public
access to data, in formats that are most useful for public consumption
and analyses of the data. The Department's open data policy must also
comply with the law, including protecting personal and private
information subject to the Privacy Act. The Department's open data
policy is also consistent with Secretary's Order (SO) 02-2019,\1\ the
Federal Data Strategy,\2\ and the Foundations for Evidence-Based
Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act).\3\
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\1\ https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/03/26/2019-05720/secretarys-order-02-2019-chief-data-officer-and-dol-data-board.
\2\ https://strategy.data.gov/.
\3\ https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-115publ435/pdf/PLAW-115publ435.pdf.
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SO 02-2019 provides the Department's framework for building data
capacity and includes the following requirements:
Identify the critical role that data play in informing and
influencing how the Department carries out its mission, and acknowledge
that these data need to be leveraged, housed, described and documented,
formatted, and made public in an optimal manner;
Formalize the Data Board as the Department's data
governance body, and as a forum to work across organizational lines to
collaborate and coordinate effectively on data strategy, management,
and policy issues, as well as data governance, stewardship,
architecture, and utilization;
Provide Departmental programs with clear descriptions of
the motivation, context, and values associated with data governance and
data strategy by linking evidence-based policymaking with the need for
modern data infrastructure and strengthened data capacity; and
Task the Data Board and the Chief Data Officer with
serving the needs of the Department and its stakeholders to focus on
the quality, consistency, and availability of data.
In addition, the Evidence Act and the recently published Federal
Data Strategy have expanded the requirements for Federal agencies to
build data capacity that benefits the public and to be transparent with
their data assets. Examples of these expansions include Section 303 of
the Evidence Act, which expands requirements for access to data for
evidence and adds a presumption of accessibility to data, and Section
202(b) of the Evidence Act, which includes guidance to make data open
by default. In similar fashion, the Federal Data Strategy explicitly
calls on agencies to identify priority data sets (Action 1) and to
identify their initial list of priority data assets for agency open
data plans (Action 5).
Consistent with all of these requirements, the Department is
building capacity for open data through the development of a new
Application Programming Interface (API), and plans to provide open data
through a data-as-a-service (DAAS) model. This model is expected to
offer efficient, on-demand methods that enable users to create
customized data extracts in a machine-readable format. The Department
is also seeking to increase the quantity and types of data sets offered
through DAAS, providing more standardized data documentation in
electronic formats--including machine-readable--and designing a central
portal for customers to find data, metadata, tools for ingesting data,
and data-specific documentation.
II. Review Focus
The Department seeks public comment on specific approaches that
could lead to wider and easier access, greater utility, and increased
comprehensibility to data and associated documentation that the
Department makes available. The Department also seeks comment on
challenges with using existing Department data,\4\ including access
mechanisms, so that the Data Board and various Departmental programs
can work to make improvements. Respondents should note that this
request for comments does not address data products designed,
collected, and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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\4\ Examples of DOL data as they are currently offered include
enforcement databases (https://enforcedata.dol.gov/homePage.php),
Wage and Hour Division's enforcement data (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data/charts), the Office of Foreign Labor
Certification's performance data (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/performance), and assorted data from the Unemployment
Insurance program (https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/DataDashboard.asp).
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The Department seeks comments on the specific characteristics of
data and supporting materials that would allow the public to better use
and benefit from our open data. Examples may include:
1. Data content and format;
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2. Data documentation, including metadata content, codebooks, and
data dictionaries;
3. Data formats specific to certain analysis patterns (e.g.,
spatial analysis, machine learning, and program evaluation) including
tagging, geocoding, and data encoding that reduce burdens and increase
efficiency;
4. Data quality issues that diminish the benefit and utility of
Departmental data and limit transparency and analyses; and
5. Challenges with data comparability including linking across
program data, establishing common identifiers across data sets, and
merging Departmental data with other Federal and non-Federal data
sources.
The Department also solicits public comment on the following areas:
6. Identifying data sets that are currently useful and merit
prioritization in forthcoming open data efforts;
7. Identifying data sets that are neither public nor available
through restricted-use access programs that could provide value to the
Department's stakeholders if made available;
8. The relative advantages and disadvantages of various machine-
readable formats including JavaScript Object Notation (JSON),
Extensible Markup Language (XML), and ASCII text files with or without
comma-separated values (CSV) files;
9. The relative advantages and disadvantages of providing open data
through DAAS vis-a-vis complexity, efficiency, convenience, automation,
and user-friendliness;
10. Specific data sets and methodologies that would be useful in
achieving the goals of President Biden's Executive Orders on Equity
from January 2021 and on Customer Experience from November 2021; and
relevant data and metadata standards that enhance interoperability,
promote transparency, aid discovery, provide understanding, and
facilitate integrating data from multiple sources.
Respondents are encouraged to associate the category numbering
above within their responses to facilitate organization and analysis of
the comments.
Signed at Washington, DC, this 7th day of June, 2022.
Scott Gibbons,
Chief Data Officer, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy.
[FR Doc. 2022-12510 Filed 6-14-22; 8:45 am]
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