I'm running for city council in a small town on the platform of transparency... really like 18f api standards, looking to find a schema to describe expenses and donations for the campaign - ie some place to create an endpoint that could be harvested by a 3rd party... looking for schemas in general - I'm using schema.org for the markup - and could probably come up with something from there? just curious whether this makes sense as an approach / if someone else is doing something similar
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1You might want to take a page from the FEC's book - they have data at fec.gov/disclosure.shtml and fec.gov/finance/disclosure/disclosure_data_search.shtml. The Sunlight Foundation's Influence Explorer might also suit you well for an example of what your data could look like: data.influenceexplorer.com/docs/contributions and data.influenceexplorer.com/contributions– Mark SilverbergJan 27, 2015 at 3:29
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2data.influenceexplorer.com/docs/contributions was a great answer - that has a nice schema - it's more than sufficient for my needs, thank you!– alibamaJan 29, 2015 at 20:27
1 Answer
The first thing to consider is what data you have and what format is it in.
Whatever it is, you can first make it available in a bulk download. Providing all the data and updating it on a schedule is a vast improvement that doesn't require a lot of overhead.
Then, take stock of what kind of format the data is in. If you have the data in PDFs, focus on a way to get that information into a data base. If the records are being kept in excel, that is at least structured but you would want to upgrade to a database as well.
If the information is in a database, then making an API is not too complicated. I would suggest a json API. Making the field names clear and readable can go a long way. Having good documentation is very important- even the best schema is frustrating if there is poor documentation.
The level of detail that you can give is dependent on the underlying detail in your data.