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

Thu Apr 26 12:17:22 UTC 2012

On 25 April 2012 22:47, Tariq Khokhar <tariq at khokhar.net> wrote:
> 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.

We store spatial information on each data catalog if available, see e.g.

<http://datacatalogs.org/catalog/data_gov_uk>
<http://datacatalogs.org/catalog/opendata_go_ke>

And there's API info for these:

<http://datacatalogs.org/api/rest/dataset/data_gov_uk>
<http://datacatalogs.org/api/rest/dataset/opendata_go_ke>

As you see this includes spatial info in the "extras" section:

spatial_text: "Great Britain",
language: "en",
spatial: "GB"

You can query on spatial info too:

<http://datacatalogs.org/dataset?spatial=ar>

Brings up catalogs in Argentina.

> 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

That would be my suggestion though it could definitely be complemented
by a traditional wiki or similar as Philip suggests.

> 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!)

Agreed re security. I note that Data Catalogs uses the moderated edits
feature of CKAN: at the moment anyone (even non-logged in users) can
make edits but for these to go live (i.e. visible in API or website)
needs an approval by a moderator.

Rufus

> 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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