Web Services for Recovery.gov

One of the main goals of the Recovery.gov Web site is provide information about how the money for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 is allocated and spent. In this report, we propose a reporting architecture that would focus on the reporting services rather than the Web site and page design, and the uses these Web services to build the user-facing part of ARRA reporting. Our proposed architecture is based on simple and well-established Web technologies, and the main goal of this architecture is to provide citizens and watchdog groups simple and easy access to machine-readable data. Our architecture uses a more sophisticated than simple downloads of data files, and is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) and uses established and widely supported Web technologies such as feeds and XML. We argue that such an architecture is easy to design and implement, easy to understand for users, and easy to work with for those who want to access ARRA reporting data in a machine-readable way.