“The open data movement has been alive at the Department of Commerce for a very long time. The predecessors to the National Weather Service have been providing open weather reports since the founding of our nation and regular weather reports have been around since the early 1900s. The Census Bureau, one of our nation’s leading statistical agencies, has also been in the open data business for decades. Census has been evolving its efforts to share its data in the best ways possible, including by embracing new technologies. However, facilitating the use of Commerce data by as many people as possible is a journey. To bring data-driven insights to new audiences, we issued a challenge to the private sector to help build new tools that make our data more actionable. In response, we’re announcing another free, open and public tool built by Socrata that makes a valuable data set from the U.S. Census Bureau more accessible—Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE). The SAHIE program annually produces timely estimates for all counties and states, with detailed demographic and income data as well. SAHIE rely heavily on American Community Survey estimates and related administrative records data….”