44
The complete USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference can be downloaded as ASCII text files from https://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964 — no PDF scraping necessary :)
Regarding product barcodes, have a look at Open Product Data, a new project by the Open Knowledge Foundation.
21
hrecipe (and microformats in general) are the bees knees and lucky for you are widely employed across the web; here's a list of sites actively publishing hrecipes in the wild; you can scrape and parse as you please!
http://www.eat-vegan.rocks/
http://funcook.com/
http://www.therecipedepository.com
http://sabores.sapo.pt/
http://www.epicurious.com/
http://www....
20
Using the Census Bureau's API, you can retrieve quite a bit of information about counties, but you need to learn where it's stored. You can request up to 50 different variables in a single call, and you can ask for all counties in the US with one call.
To the census, "cities" are "places," and that includes things that you and I might think of as a city but ...
19
Check out:
An official source for agency information: https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/agencies
GSA API: http://www.usa.gov/About/developer-resources/federal-agency-directory/index.shtml
Source: https://github.com/unitedstates/orgchart/issues/1
19
Have a look at OpenFoodFacts, which is a "free, open and collaborative database of food products from the entire world." It contains almost 920,000 items from around the world and may be helpful in solving your issue.
18
APIs are often offered by websites so that developers can use the web-based data for apps, without having the uncertainty and difficulty of scraping the HTML. But it's not necessary to use the data to build apps, and this means that APIs can be a great source of data for research and analysis. Just to name a few types of API data: weather forecasts, ...
16
The USDA now provides an Open API for the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference using data.gov. You need a data.gov API key in order to access this, and requests are sent to api.data.gov using the REST protocol.
16
Have you seen WikiQuote by the Wikimedia Foundation?
There is an API endpoint at http://en.wikiquote.org/w/api.php which uses the standard MediaWiki API for there are API clients in many different languages.
EDIT: Two WikiQuote API-specific links: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13762688/wiki-quotes-api and http://bwgz57.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/in-...
15
There are several different potential sources of information. I don't think any are completely comprehensive and few would count as strict "open data": apart from Open Access titles, licensing is likely to vary between publishers.
Having said that you could look at some of the following sources:
Springer API
Nature Linked Data Platform
PubMed API
PLOS API
...
14
http://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a free API that provides VIN decoding and lists of Makes/Models/Manufacturers/Parts/etc.
XML, JSON, CSV
Here is an example to fetch all vehicle makes:
http://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/vehicles/getallmakes?format=json
13
Here is most comprehensive list of all .gov /Developer pages compiled by Gray Brooks at GSA
http://gsa.github.io/slash-developer-pages/
You can suggest new additions if some info is missing. It is currently well maintained.
13
You can find a wealth of government APIs at the Data.gov developer page.
As far as real-time nature of the data feeds, the APIs vary in their update frequency. For example, flight status from the FAA updates every 10 - 15 minutes:
13
I've used MarineTraffic.com for finding details about yachts and ships I've seen in ports. It's a really cool website.
They also have an API, but, unfortunately, there is no free access.
There is an API option from FleetMon that is mostly-free:
The FleetMon Public API lets software developers create great software apps that are able to display ship ...
12
The U.S. Small Business Administration has an API that provides U.S. City and County Data.
This geographic names data set provides a "mashup" of URLs for official city and county government web sites and city and county location data from the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). GNIS data includes incorporated places, census designated areas, ...
12
A quick Google search turns up several APIs.
Google Books
Amazon
LibraryThing
half.com
isbndb.com
Goodreads
Bookfinder
Open Library
WorldCat API
You can limit your queries to these resources by knowing that French ISBNs start with a 2 and English ISBN's start with a 0 or 1.
Edit
As far as getting ISBNs for older books
Reprints of older books will be ...
12
With a little searching, I found what I was looking for. NASA has an archive of Exoplanets, as well as an API for it. The data are updated weekly.
Archive Home
API
12
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 ...
12
You probably want this:
https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbgetentities&props=labels&ids=Q19675&languages=es
The API command in English: Get information about some entities (action=wbgetentities), namely the label properties (props=labels) of item Q19675 (ids=Q19675) in Spanish (languages=es).
For more details, have a look at the full ...
11
(Disclaimer: I work for the U.S. Treasury but am writing in my personal capacity.)
I do not know of an API that has what you are looking for off the shelf, but I would recommend you look into what information you can already access or request from the official system governing registration in the .gov domain. The .gov domain registration process for cities ...
11
Recently, the paper Linked Soccer Data was published. In it the authors describe how they combined various football-related datasets, such as http://fussballdaten.de/. Some of the data they covered can be viewed through this demo application.
The paper also mentions other relevant sources of football data, including the openfooty API.
11
If you haven't already, check our ProgrammableWeb - it lets you search for APIs by keyword, type, etc.
http://www.programmableweb.com/search/recipe
http://www.programmableweb.com/search/allergy
Hope this helps.
10
The Google Elevation API should allow you to access elevation data world-wide and allows you to give location as latitude/longitude.
What Can You Do With the Elevation API?
The Elevation API provides elevation data for all locations on the surface of the earth, including depth locations on the ocean floor (which return negative values). In those ...
10
The other answers so far are all terrific. I'll reiterate one point, and make a new one:
The openness of an API is always important, but when complete, quality bulk data is available some of these access issues become a lot more tolerable. An API is not a substitute for bulk data. The federal government has become very API focused, and many of them have ...
9
It's hard to know if this is canonical, and it's not structured, but there is the USA.gov Government Departments and Agencies page, which includes an A-Z list. It doesn't have all of the data you are looking for, but it's a start.
9
I ended up creating my own system combining a bunch of APIs. Here is what I did:
I pulled the homepage text from each website and cleaned up all the html, javascript and styles
I pushed this text out to various APIs to process and stored the results. I used alchemyapi.com, textrazor.com, opencalais.com. Those APIs have a lot of options but mainly I focused ...
8
Check out the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository. Admittedly not exactly what you are looking for, but if you want data on NYS you can at least download it easily, and it might be possible to automate it if you have the time to write a script.
I'm not sure what's available in other states, but this seems to be pretty par for the course ...
8
After doing some research and testing its search features today, I found the Worldcat database to be the best candidate for multi-language ISBN search. It has more in that it also has other media, such as DVD's and audio CD's, but for books it gets correct results every time, even for 1980 books not printed anymore. All media included, they say its database ...
8
I've been building an API for this called DemocracyMap. Probably the most relevant data resource for the basic details of city and county government is the Census of Governments: Government Integrated Directory which provides city/county name, address of gov office, phone number, etc. This in combination with Census Tiger boundary data will get you pretty ...
8
The Wordnik API will tell you whether any single word is a valid scrabble word (among other information).
http://developer.wordnik.com/docs.html#!/word/getWord_get_1
I am not sure that's exactly what you're looking for, but it's the best I've got.
8
If you agree that "the web is an API", you may scrape statistics from HTML pages. For instance, oddsportal.com has historical betting quotes.
I suppose this data is not open but maybe helpful for personal use/fun.
If you are using the programming language R, you might find this vignette on web scraping match data (PDF) helpful.
Today I found football-data....
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