[open-government] Global index of primary public government (ideally open) data sources? Ideally with an API?

Wed Apr 25 20:55:50 UTC 2012

On 25 April 2012 21:38, Tariq Khokhar <tariq at khokhar.net> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I work on  http://data.worldbank.org/  and as you may know, we have "country
> pages" that list our data for countries and regions around the world. Index
> at:   http://data.worldbank.org/country -  And here's Kenya:
> http://data.worldbank.org/country/kenya
>
> I'd like to also start listing primary data sources on all these country
> pages, so for Kenya, we'd at least have links to:
>
> http://opendata.go.ke/  (national open data initiative)
> http://www.knbs.or.ke/  (national stats office)

What about datacatalogs.org. Though primarily focused on data catalogs
at the present we could expand it to include things like the stats
office.

> And ideall any other ministries or departments with public (ideally open)
> data. A lot our data also comes from other sources (e.g. FAO or the ITU) so
> being able to link to the data pages of these institutions would also be
> great.
>
> Does anybody know of a well maintained and curated index of primary
> government (ideally open) data sources (including publishing
> ministries/departments) with the index available as an API the World Bank
> could pull from while making our country pages?

http://datacatalogs satisfies all those criteria but currently may not
be inclusive enough.

> If there isn't something like this, ideas for how to do it much appreciated
> - we'd be happy to host and help put something together.

I think datacatalogs could definitely expand to include stats offices
and other relevant open data providers. (I also note that the DataHub
has long carried a lot of general sites that are open data provides
though we are trying to phase that out in favour of things that are
proper datasets as supposed to collection of datasets).

> The UN's list of stats offices may be a good
> start: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/inter-natlinks/sd_natstat.asp but
> I don't know how they license this.

Good point.

Rufus