[open-government] Call for Collaboration: publicbodies.org

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

Hi all,

having done some work on spending data analysis, I think there is a
demand not only for a reconciliation service for companies (which the
excellent OpenCorporates.com provides), but also for public entities
of all kinds. As an example of the problem, look at
http://openspending.org/dataset/ukdepartments/dimension/department_family
(totals are broken atm).

As a big fan of OpenCorporates approach on companies, I'd like to
propose the creation of a copycat service at publicbodies.org -
perhaps with less entity metadata but as an endpoint for
reconciliation of public bodies.

In order to help with this, I'd like to ask everyone's support in a
brief survey:

* Does such a service already exist?
* Which countries and admin regions publish (machine-readable) lists
of public bodies, departments etc.?
* Which identifier schemes/taxonomies exist for the classification of
such entities?
* Any other hints?

Thanks for your help!

- Friedrich

p.s. As for software implementation, I've started a very basic
python-based recon server at https://github.com/okfn/helmut to
familiarize myself with the API. This can be customized for
publicbodies.org but also used in other places, e.g. for MIME types,
Taxonomies etc. - wherever we have fuzzy values that need to be
matched to a set of given URIs.

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