Back in October we announced that to celebrate our 100th GitHub project we'd be giving away a Kindle (or Gift Certificate) to say thanks to one lucky contributor to our Open Source projects.
If you find yourself with a bit of extra time during this holiday season and want to help make government more transparent please take some time to contribute to one of these projects (or any of the 100 others). In order to be eligible be sure to fill out the entry form.
Continue readingSo you've found some government data on the web. Naturally, you are eager to share your findings with the world. Perfect! Sunlight Labs can help. Our National Data Catalog (NatDatCat) is hungry for government data, and we have to feed it regularly. Otherwise, it gets grumpy.
The first step is to assess what you've found. If it is just a few bits of scattered files, just fill out a quick form and tell us about it. On the other hand, if it is a collection of data sets, you might consider writing an importer...
Continue readingThe National Data Catalog went live last week. Now we would like to share a little bit about our API and how it fits into our platform.
The National Data Catalog (NDC) is an open source catalog for government data sets and APIs. Our goal is to have it encompass all data released by or about governments in the United States. This includes federal, state, and local jurisdictions. The NDC will harness the community of users interested in open government data.
Web developers can take a look at our API documentation.
Continue readingAfter 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.
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A few weeks ago, we speculated that a new Data.gov was on the way after hearung murmurs of a new ConOps (concept of operations) being circulated around by government employees. The new Data.gov Concept of Operations document has been released, and the Data.gov team is seeking feedback from the public.
I've just started reading the report, but it has some cameo appearances from some of our Apps for America entries as well as some really interesting ideas for how data should be reported on by the different agencies. Data.gov will definitely be the cornerstone of the new Open Government Directive.
So right now, go download the document and let them know what you think. I for one, think they need to use the National Data Catalog architecture and source.
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