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

Chris Taggart countculture at gmail.com
Mon Jul 4 14:38:35 UTC 2011


Definite +1 from me (but then you prob knew that anyway). We've got some
from OpenlyLocal and like you the spending data, but would be good to pull
this together. FWIW think it should be separate from OpenSpending (and poss
even OKF) to avoid making a single point of power/failure (one of the
reasons I haven't wanted to do it for OpenCorporates), but think everybody
in this space would benefit from such a thing existing.

Chris

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
OpenCorporates :: The Open Database of the Corporate World
http://opencorporates.com
OpenlyLocal :: Making Local Government More Transparent
http://openlylocal.com
Blog: http://countculture.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture

On 4 July 2011 15:02, Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org>wrote:

> 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.
>
> --
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
> http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/
>
> http://twitter.com/pudo
> http://pudo.org
>
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