Government 2.0 is about transforming government by making it more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. We believe that that simplest way to make government geodata publicly available is to publish it as HTML web pages because HTML pages are searchable using standard web search engines such as Google. HTML pages means users can search for and find raw geospatial data in the same familiar way they find anything else on the web.

We describe an open source project (www.geoREST.org) that is based on the concept of web-searchable open geodata and show why it is both compelling and important. We discuss how geodata can be easily published at the record-level as HTML, JSON, KML, PNG, and other formats using GeoREST web services which enables geodata to be searched, filtered, and retrieved simply using URLs and without programming.