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

Fri May 3 11:04:49 UTC 2013

On 3 May 2013 09:55, SHEN Liang <shenzhuxi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Rufus,
>
> Should I fork https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies, add data and make
> a pull request like the normal GitHub workflow?

That was my original plan but given how much data some people seem to
have I'm wondering. If the file is say > 5mb i suggest posting outside
of github for the moment and we do a first review there (for example,
with recent discussion re Italian dataset which was ~6mb it turned out
we can perhaps drop the list of every school (that's a separate useful
dataset of course!).

> Is http://publicbodies.org/ based on ckan? What about

At the moment it is not based on CKAN because it is just a simple
site, see http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2013/05/01/publicbodies.org-an-update.html
for more details. I am thinking that with the amount of data coming in
we may need to revisit having a db rather than flat file but we want
to push it as far as we can.

> http://datahub.io/dataset/uk-public-bodies?

Very useful - i had forgotten about that (great data from David
Pidsley!). We should try and merge this.

> Can people help updating data easily?

Yes, that's the idea though we could make this much better. See this
open issue: https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies/issues/8

> Is there any API for data query rather than JSON url and CSV download
> (I think ckan has)?

At the moment: no. I've made this super simple but we could easily
pushed the consolidated data into the ckan datastore. I've just opened
an issue for this: https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies/issues/20

> BTW, I have a list of journal feeds from http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/
> several years ago and they've stopped releasing it.
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjfpjwzLd5bUdEY5MF9KUmROaW1WZklOYmoweEtZakE&usp=sharing
> I'd like to have a crowdsourcing platform to keep it updating.

Very interesting. As you say this is a good match for crowdcrafting.

> For not so big data, Google Drive is not a bad way for crowdsourcing,
> but I think OKFN should have the open source solution. Maybe
> http://crowdcrafting.org/ + http://datahub.io/.

That is a great idea and in fact I believe Daniel Gonzalez (in cc) is
working on this (suggest we fork a thread for this).

Rufus