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

Wed Apr 25 21:47:19 UTC 2012

Thanks Phil and Rufus,

I also thought of datacatalogs.org and checked the Civic Commons wiki but
neither seem to offer or mention anything with enough coverage/stability to
do an API call for any country code we cover, that then returns URLs +
descriptions for official primary sources in that country.

Do you think putting effort into improving datacatalogs.org is the way to
go? I guess the catalog could be queried by the country field and we just
massage the response? It would also be reassuring for our web security
people that we weren't building on top of something that was liable to get
hacked or gamed (us linking to a country's stats ministry that suddenly
looked a lot like an online poker site would not go down well!)

Thanks again :-)

tk

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>wrote:

> 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
>

-- 
Tariq Khokhar
email  : tariq at khokhar.net
skype  : tariq.khokhar
twitter: @tkb
phone  : +44 (0)7876630485 (UK-Cell)
phone  : +1 202-250-4428  (US-Cell)
web    : www.khokhar.net
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