After several months in development, I’m happy to announce that the National Data Catalog is up and operational. This site represents months of work by Team Ruby members Luigi Montanez and David James. Since July of 2009 when we kicked off the project, they’ve been working hard at building a great architecture for the system, and pulling in data pointers from sites like Data.gov, The DC OCTO and Utah’s Data Catalog. Presently, we, alongside our volunteers are working on importers for DataSF, Rhode Island, and New York City.

Besides the fact that we include data from multiple branches of government, there are a few great reasons why the National Data Catalog is a great resource for government data. Most importantly, the system has its own built in documentation system powered by our community. This will help make government data more useful by making it so we don’t all have to learn the nuance of a particular dataset individually. Now those resources can be shared.

We also include data from outside the government so that we can share these datasets and resources alongside their government counterparts.

Search is great. Here’s all the information about Air Quality. And Here’s information about active mines in the US.

David James gives us a great tour of what it can do:

As we move forward, consider writing an importer for your state or municipality. To contribute to the project, you can check out the source in github, and join the NatDatCat Google Group.

Please check out this great source for finding government data, help us work out the kinks, and build the largest catalog of government information in the world.