[open-development] Data catalogue from Sunlight Labs - possible platform for intl aid data registry?

Wed Feb 24 15:01:32 UTC 2010

Hi Everyone -

I was in a meeting yesterday with the folks at Sunlight Labs, which is a
driving force behind the open data movement in the US, and they are
releasing a National Data Catalogue (http://nationaldatacatalog.com/ -
note it is still in beta) to provide a more robust alternative to
Data.gov.  Their goal is to open up the data submission beyond just US gov
agencies, build communities around data, make it more user friendly, AND
perhaps most important, make it a platform that third parties and
developers can more easily build apps on and convert data among different
formats.

The reason this is interesting is they are sharing the source code, and
are interested in other groups leveraging it for similar efforts.  It is
built on the Ruby on Rails platform, and presumably we could modify it to
support an international registry of international development datasets
(e.g. change the metadata schema, interface, etc).

I know there might already be efforts on this underway, but this is a
$500k platform from one of the most capable open source development shops
I am aware of working on this issue.

Would there be any interest in a conversation with these guys about if/how
we might be able to build on this?

If so let me know and I can help facilitate.

Joe

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Joe Pringle
Forum One Communications
703-894-4330
www.forumone.com