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It is very recommended and would very likely smooth the process by at least an order of magnitude.
22
Often any request for information, formally or informally, is a FOIA request. But either way, talking to someone specific has helped a lot in my experience.
My favored approach:
See if the info is anywhere online. If it isn't...
Find someone in the office holding the data and talk to them about what data they collect. Way easier than doing the back and ...
21
Health
Behavioral Risk-Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) - A health-related survey that asks respondents about health and disease risk factors.
Unit of Analysis: County
Area Health Resource File (AHRF) - A compilation of Census Bureau demographic information, along with information about hospital utilization, health professionals, and natality/mortality....
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
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The "Common Core of Data" (CCD) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education (ED) is your starting point.
For Public Schools (PK-12), see http://www.ed.gov/developers and http://www.data.gov/education including:
Public elementary/secondary school listing
School district / Local education agency (LEA) ...
18
The IRS website has an Exempt Organizations Select Check that allows the user to search for organizations that:
Are eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions
Were automatically revoked
Have filed Form 990-N (e-Postcard)
After selecting one of these options, a link will appear to download the entire database of organizations. The databases (plain-...
18
California Polytechnic State University has a downloaded dataset on fatal accidents on the national highway system for the year 2007:
https://wiki.csc.calpoly.edu/datasets/wiki/HighwayAccidents
Data.Gov has a number of datasets on accident data by state:
https://explore.data.gov/catalog/raw?tags=crash
The NHTSA has summary statistics for 2012 on a state ...
17
A common strategy used by journalists I've worked with is to first FOIA a data schema or other explanation of how the data is managed by the government body. This allows you to be much more explicit in constructing your actual request.
And as rcackerman noted, you may not actually have to start with a FOIA -- but ask them what they have and how they have it,...
17
You might want to check out the HUD zip code-county crosswalk (screenshot below).
My gut feeling is that this feature would be in the US census TIGER product line
https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html
maybe here:
https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/relationship.html
Please let us know what you find most useful.
answered Jan 20 '15 at 13:04
respectPotentialEnergy
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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
Some other answers hint at this, but the caution to keep in mind is that ZIP codes are not geographies on a map. They are identifiers for postal delivery routes which are often but not always geographic.
To accommodate the intense demand for data aggregated by ZIP code, the Census Bureau created ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (or ZCTAs) which are roughly what ...
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
Currently Data.gov is run on bunch of technologies. Specifically one of the primary data platforms is Socrata - explore.data.gov.
There is API for it defined here http://dev.socrata.com/, but essentially you can call this endpoint and iterate through all pages of master list of datasets
https://explore.data.gov/api/dcat.json?page=1
I have sample scrapers ...
12
Resource.org has gathered reports dating back to 2002 and says that they process new data monthly. Bulk data can be pulled from here.
For those who prefer a simple search, the Economic Research Institute (ERI) has a database of forms dating back to 2003.
In at least one case, a journalist on the NICAR-L list reported back that there was a form in the ERI ...
11
The CPI is based on surveys conducted by BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Those surveys collect price information which is reviewed by commodity experts. Those experts review (and possible adjust) the data based on their knowledge of the particular commodity. That adjusted data is then averaged to calculate the CPI. You can definitely get the values that ...
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
Try NHGIS, it has built a resource that offers what you are looking for.
The race question is available at the block level from the 2010 Census Summary File 1 release; but the income question is available only through the American Community Survey (ACS) Summary File release which goes down to the block group level. If you want the information together, I ...
11
There is no simple answer to this question, because ZIP codes do not represent geographical areas. They represent postal delivery routes, which are sometimes simply a bank of PO boxes in a specific post office, and are sometimes an organization like a University which has its own internal mail processing services.
Therefore, not all ZIP Codes can truly be ...
11
As a work of the US government, there isn't any license appropriate for the work, because it's already in the public domain (in the United States). So a license like the Unlicense (or CC0), in which the licensor is entering the covered work into the public domain, doesn't work. Some text that acknowledges the public domain status in the US is helpful (and ...
10
On the Data.gov team, we'll be blogging and posting here as well about some of the upcoming changes. The intent is to have all of you give us feedback as we start to evolve ideas, rather than just seeing what happens at the end of the design process.
My blog above shows the catalog upgrade using CKAN 2.0 (it's the demonstration site, so don't worry if you ...
10
There has been some mention about this being a complex problem. It's not hard at all. In fact, matching a zipcode to the corresponding cities is super simple. Granted, trying to find an accurate shapefile that corresponds to a given zipcode, that is a more challenging issue. But simply matching zipcode to city/cities... very easy. The USPS data has a ...
9
The IRS maintains data on non-profits that have received a tax exemption from the agency, but that doesn't include every non-profit organization, only those who have received the tax exemption.
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
OpenEI from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) maintains a list of both the utilities participating and a map as well as other Green Button apps.
9
The Department of Energy's Green Button website offers a list of companies who have implemented it:
The Green Button initiative was officially launched in January 2012.
To date, a total of 35 utilities and electricity suppliers have signed
on to the initiative. In total, these commitments ensure that 36
million homes and businesses will be able to ...
9
The bifurcated view of open data on Data.gov will evaporate later this month and there will be an API to the entire catalog. You can also separate that catalog along geo and non-geo data if that's your preference. To get an early look at the direction we are heading, check out: http://geo.gov.ckan.org/dataset
Raw data is being merged with geo-data as ...
9
Some of the information you are looking for can be found by looking at the tags portion of the web site you can see how people are tagging their questions. Of the More popular tags the one I think you would most interested in is API (at the time of this writing approximately 1 in 7 questions are tagged with API). I think the most important thing in an API is ...
9
There's also a good list just released from ProPublica starting for 2012 http://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
And you can always request a 990 directly from an entity -- it is required to give it to you.
Also, GuideStar aggregates them and allows you to obtain one-at-a-time at no cost. Aggregate data will cost, however.
9
There are several datasets that might be useful to you. The list you are seeking is the Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data, with details here. This provides a listing of all public elementary and secondary schools, student data, and teacher information. This includes the names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
In addition, overall ...
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