All Questions

Which communities are doing a good job on capturing community ideas around open gov / civic technology / policy improvements? Additional Questions? If you were to break out ideation categories, how ...

In Chicago, a lot of data has been released on the City's Data Portal, but I have no idea how much is left to be opened. The strategy I've noticed governments seem to follow is to start with a ...

Many cities have opened up data on various forms of service requests, but it's difficult to interpret these data. If we see that part of a city has more calls for potholes, does that mean that there ...

For federal grant applications, specific geographical areas and populations often have to meet minimum qualifications in order to demonstrate a need that allows them to apply for a grant (e.g. median ...

The U.S. Government Policy on Open Data Memo directs agencies to take into account the "mosaic effect." Theoretically, it seems like the mosaic effect could justify the restriction of almost any data....

Recently, I worked on a project that scrapes the county sheriff's inmate locator site as a roundabout way to get insight into where the delays occur in the local court system. The photograph, name, ...

Where can I find a list or directory of other organizations, foundations and investment firms that are interested in funding "Open Data" initiatives? Those that are focused on Open Government data ...

Update: It appears there have been two directions in terms of answering this question. Data interchange (ex. HTTP, FTP, P2P), and data formatting (ex. JSON, XML, CSV). My original question was about ...

The U.S. government publishes a range of finance data sets (see, e.g., www.Treasury.gov/financedata). What additional data sets that the government already collects would be valuable if released in ...

Has anyone adapted a microdata format from schema.org for pieces of legislation?

I'm looking for a database of URLs for every official city and town website. Ideally this list would be up to date and maintained. Freebase has some of the results and we have every city and town in ...

So, looking at geonames, I am finding that there are a significant number of blindspots regarding zipcode mappings. Many countries are missing. Some countries have abbreviated data (prefixes in ...

Is there a way to represent Administrative Fund spendings? e.g. organization overhead paying for organization's admin/hr functions at HQ, not allocated to specific countries aid/development projects. ...

IATI Standard has "result" element, which includes "baseline" and "indicator" elements to represent project performance. http://iatistandard.org/activities-standard/result/ Is there an example how it ...

It would be very valuable for government officials and the public to be able to track the uses of open data sets. Are there sources that currently do this and make the information available to the ...

USA data on death can be obtained via Social Security as SSDI (death index) and SSDMF (death master file). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Death_Index One site http://ssdmf.info offers ...

Here are a couple of questions where the Sunlight Foundation is referenced: Does any City have POIA (Public Online Information act) laws in place? Open Data Scorecards? What is the purpose of the ...

There are already certain basic APIs for census tracts, school districts, energy costs, a range of geo data, zip codes, etc. What I'm wondering is what would be other fundamental web services that ...

Clearly, government agencies should default to observing the broader trends of API producers but are there particular best practices that a government API should follow? (Disclaimer - I am the Sr. ...

I have become very interested in genetic algorithms or GAs (which are not necessarily related in any way to genetics or genomics; see link). This algorithmic method of searching is very well-suited to ...

Most maps using count of reports of crime end up being maps of the population density of cities. An attractive response would be to turn these counts into a rate, but a rate per what? Most commonly, ...

I have seen this acronym a lot on this website, but I don't know what it means! The main header of CKAN.org claims, "the world’s leading open-source data portal platform". What is a data portal ...

There's another question about a list of all nonprofits, and this answer is kind of buried in the answers to that one. Also, this question came up today on the NICAR-L mailing list. It's a common ...

I recently heard of GTFS as a specification for the times and geographic information regarding transit networks. It is initially used by Google to integrate them into Google Maps but is now made to be ...

Is there a downloadable archive of weather conditions in Europe? Also, the temperature, humidity, precipitation by location? So the database would enable, for example, to draw the chart with ...

Is there a list or database or API for finding hot-spots and public available wifis for Germany? Of course this data is volatile, so it should be often actualized.

I was browsing through the datasets on the website, and datasets like "Tax Year 2007--" caught my attention. At first I thought it might be Census data. However, if you look at the "About" tag for ...

Often, we have catalogs of events or features that are based off of a time-series of data that has gaps. I was wondering if there were any standards for describing those gaps, and what type of gap ...

The likes of data.gov.uk and data.gov are keen to build a community around their data. How should that best be done? The main aim is to create a feedback loop, encouraging use of the data and release ...

Are there any open datasets about manned space missions? I'm looking for basic information like name and nationality of the astronauts or cosmonauts, launcher, goals, time in space, results, and so on....

My background with open/free licensing is only within FOSS. An example of category differences within FOSS is Copyleft/Permissive. There is a variety of licenses even within these categories. GPL, MIT ...

I'm working on a site to help Chicagoans understand what their city council is doing. As part of that effort, I would like to roll up the many different types of legislation into a handful of ...

The US Government recently announced an intent to upgrade Data.gov. What are the specific technical plans to do so?

The US Government just launched Project Open Data on GitHub, which includes best practices, free tools to accelerate adoption of open data practices, and common core metadata for the federal ...

In the past, I have released data as zipped Shapefiles (for the professional GIS crowd) and KML/KMZ (viewable by anyone using Google Earth). Are there other formats that would be especially helpful?

Data.gov provides ~400,000 datasets from 180 federal agencies. However, I know you are interested in more data and more specific data than what is already included. What additional topics, formats, or ...

I work with a a couple of small non-profit genealogical and historical groups and we are interested in releasing some of the datasets we've compiled over the years as open data. This information is ...

These datasets would be structured and presented in a way that is accessible for students or scholars interested in machine learning. Students could use them to learn how to create applications that ...

I am looking for an API or dataset that has information about the known exoplanets. The properties of this dataset would include things like mass, orbital period, atmosphere, temperature, etc.

Weather data is often cited as a "huge success" for the open data community. Where does this data sit, and how does one parse the data into something readable, like the 5 day forecast?

I'm interested in the process of how an agency, like the EPA, GSA, or Department of State, finds a dataset they wish to release, selects it, and how they go about releasing it to the public. How do ...

Are there quantified self products (fitbit, withings, nike fuelband, zeo, etc) that share bulk aggregate data with the public via API or download? For example: runs per zipcode, steps per county, or ...

There are some individually maintained lists for some Scrabble dictionaries, and some websites for looking up words in those dictionaries: SOWPODS list: https://raw.github.com/jmlewis/valett/master/...

One of the problems with distributing data is that people think they understand it, and try to use it in ways that may be incompatable with the files. Examples: Years ago, one of the scientists I ...

I know that there are political issues (my place of work bans all peer-to-peer software without an explicit waiver), but how well does bit torrent scale for distributing large data collections where ...

The formal semantic web, now linked data, using RDF is largely flailing in most regions outside the UK. The main problem is the complexity in implementation compared with the tools typically used by ...

The Data Hub, powered by CKAN, is an impressive collection of datasets available on the web. Currently it lists more than 6000 datasets — however, not all of them are available under an Open Data ...

I've seen many applications (mobile and web) that use a database of nutritional information and barcodes to track daily food consumption. Smartphones have the ability to scan barcodes, and many mobile ...

While there are many open databases available, is there a database or the project that would contain the information of such databases? In other words, is there an open meta-database of open ...

When OCLC released their WorldCat data under Open Data Commons Attribution License last year, there was a question in the library community as to exactly what would be required for adequate ...