Earlier this year we started on the Data Commons, a project to merge open government data sets to make them more searchable and usable. Our goal for the initial release is to load state and federal campaign contribution data from The Center for Responsive Politics and The National Institute for Money in State Politics. Along with the raw transactional records, we will be taking the additional step of matching the entities (people, organizations, corporations, etc.) across the data sets. We'll have more posts soon with details about the Data Commons.

To assist us in this effort, we are developing Matchbox, a toolkit for the merging and matching of entities. We have big plans for Matchbox, but want to get feedback from the community as we improve it over the next few months.