[okfn-labs] Update on PublicBodies.org - a URL for every part of Government

Wed May 1 10:17:48 UTC 2013

Hi All,

This is an update on PublicBodies.org - a Labs project whose aim is to
provide a "URL for every part of Government":
<http://publicbodies.org/>

Full post here:
<http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2013/05/01/publicbodies.org-an-update.html>

PublicBodies.org is a database and website of "Public Bodies" -- that
is Government-run or controlled organizations (which may or may not
have distinct corporate existence). Examples would include government
ministries or departments, state-run organizations such as libraries,
police and fire departments and more.

You run into public bodies all the time in projects like OpenSpending
(either as spenders or recipients). Back in 2011 as part of the
"Organizations" data workshop at OGD Camp 2011, Labs member Friedrich
Lindenberg scraped together a first database and site of "public
bodies" from various sources (primarily FoI sites like WhatDoTheyKnow,
FragDenStaat and AskTheEU).

I and Friedrich have recently re-done the site converting the sqlite
DB to simple flat CSV files:

- Main github repo: <https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies>
- Example raw CSV: <https://raw.github.com/okfn/publicbodies/master/data/gb.csv>

The site itself is now super-simple flat-files hosted on s3 (build
code [1]). Here's an example of the output:

- European Parliament: <http://publicbodies.org/eu/european-parliament.html>
- Associated JSON API (with CORS!)
<http://publicbodies.org/eu/european-parliament.json>

The simplicity of CSV for data plus simple templating to flat-files is
very attractive. There are some drawbacks such as changes to primary
template resulting in a full rebuild and upload of ~6k files so,
especially as the data grows, we may want to look into something a bit
nicer but for the time being I think this works well.

Thoughts and suggestions very welcome!

[1]: https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies/tree/master/site

## Next Steps

There's plenty that could be improved e.g.

* More data - other jurisdictions (we only cover EU, UK and Germany) +
descriptions for the bodies (this could be a nice crowdcrafting app)
* Search and Reconciliation (via nomenklatura)
* Making it easier to submit corrections or additions

The full list of issues is on github here:
<https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies/issues>

Help on these most definitely wanted! Just grab one of the issues or
get in touch ...