The paragraph-length descriptions of line items in the Government Budget, as found in Estimates of Appropriations PDFs, in a structured computer-readable queryable format like a spreadsheet, XML, JSON, or semantic HTML tables. I think the proper name of these line-item descriptions is "Scopes of Appropriations". For example, as seen in http://treasury.govt.nz/budget/2011/estimates/est11health.pdf, the description of "Health Sector Information Systems" is "This appropriation is limited to the provision of information technology services and the publication of data derived from these services to the health and disability system." Ideally I'd like to have a description for each item in the budget spreadsheets available at http://treasury.govt.nz/budget/2011/data. It would be great to have these descriptions available in the budget expenses/incomes spreadsheets (that's probably the easiest way to do it, you could just add another column to the spreadsheet), or otherwise some other structured computer-readable format like XML or JSON or even semantic HTML tables.

I run http://wheresmytaxes.co.nz, and some of the budget items are difficult to understand.

For example, under Ministry of Health, there are line items like "Payment Services", "Provider Development", "Sector Planning and Performance", "Managing the Purchases of Services". These all sound very vague, and I don't know how to interpret them, and I get a lot of questions like "what does this mean?".

The data is available right now, in PDFs like http://treasury.govt.nz/budget/2011/estimates/est11health.pdf on the page http://treasury.govt.nz/budget/2011/estimates.

However, it's very difficult to extract the relevant data from these PDFs so I can incorporate it into the website. I tried writing a program to extract the data, but it proved too difficult (extracting data from PDFs is a nightmare). I could go through and copy the descriptions out by hand, but that would take a very long time (there are thousands of line items in the budget), and all my work would be obsolete when the next budget comes out next year, and I'd have to do it all over again - and so would anybody else who wants to visualise this data. So I think it would be best for Treasury to manage it once for everyone, as they already have all the data in a workable format.

I could change the site so you can hover over an expense and see a paragraph-length description of the item, letting users answer questions like "what is this, really?", and help them better understand the government budget.