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I'm trying to locate the raw data from FedBizOpps or an API to the daily information. On their site they provide a link, but the page is a 404.

Is there a way to download all active electronic notice information from FBO in a machine-readable format? To further transparency and support the Open Government Initiative, FedBizOpps created a weekly XML file that contains all active Opportunities (Presolicitations, Combined Synopsis/Solicitations, Awards, etc) which is accessible from the Data.gov Raw Data Catalog located at http://www.data.gov/catalog/raw. This file was designed to streamline data presentation outside the system. Click here if you are interested in an incremental view of the active FedBizOpps notices.

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Full disclosure: I am a GSA employee and the Tech Lead for FBOpen, a website and API for search and discovery of federal business opportunities.

There is indeed both bulk data and an fbo.gov API available, although I can only offer experience with the former. There are two different versions of the bulk FTP downloads, weekly files and nightly files. These two are quite different. The weekly XML is proper XML and straightforward to parse. The nightly XML is XML in name and appearance only, but there is a special parser grammar available for it.

https://github.com/presidential-innovation-fellows/fbo-parser

Depending on your needs, you can also use our FBOpen API. Since we rely on the nightly files, we will generally be about a day, sometimes two, behind fbo.gov. You can find more information at our Github repo, and please offer feedback and ask any questions by opening an Issue.

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  • Hi @Alison, Is there a parser available for this in php? – Amar Pratap Sep 30 '16 at 17:27
  • Hi @AmarPratap, no, but as long as you have an environment you can run Node.js in, there's no reason you can't use the JSON output of the parser with any PHP application you wish to build. – Alison R. Oct 1 '16 at 14:30
  • Hi @AlisonR.! The (github.com/18f/fbopen)[GitHub Repo] is showing [DEPRECATED] and the (18f.github.io/fbopen/apidocs)[FBOpen API] Docs link goes to 404 Page not found. Has this API moved? Or did the govt shut it down? How can I access this open data legally? – Shiva Oct 1 '17 at 7:24
  • Hi @Shiva, FBOpen is no longer hosted, but the code is still open source on Github, and the open data sources are totally legal for you to access. I haven't worked on the project for a couple of years, so I can't say what's still there or whether it still works, but it's all there for you to use if you can! – Alison R. Oct 4 '17 at 19:15

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