Data.gov is open source | Hacker News Reader

Data.gov is open source

data.gov

77 pointsahi17 comments

It should be noted that the software running Data.gov itself has not been made open source. This is a project of the American and Indian governments to produce an open-source version of Data.gov to be shared with other governments.

Here's an open-source government data catalog originally made for the City of Philadelphia, built on Django:

http://civiccommons.org/apps/open-data-catalog

Forgive me but I don't understand.

If the data is available for download (preferably via ftp) what needs to be "open source"?

Personally I do not care what software they use to run the site so long as the data is available for download in a open format like CSV. Compare this with offering the data in little bits via some silly JSON API or offering it in some format that requires some addtional closed source software to process.

To me, the data is what is important. What software they choose to use is not important, as long as the data is easily accesible (ftp is my preference). What's important is that I can use whatever software I want to process the data.

Yep. They open sourced the equivalent of their marketing site, not an actual data platform. Very disappointing. As another poster mentioned, CKAN is open source, and does include the data hosting platform (based on elasticsearch). Max Ogden has also published two projects that seem relevant: datacouch and (I think) the pdx API for Portland, which are both couchdb based. All three are worth checking out.

OGPL seems like a confusing acronym for an open source platform.

It is licensed under GPL, though (inherited from Drupal):

https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform/blob/mast...

I think that having a list of open data country sources could be interesting.

At the moment we have:

- USA

data.gov [linked by ahi]

- City of Philadelphia

http://opendataphilly.org/ [linked by luigi]

- Spain

https://datospublicos.jottit.com/ [spanish link, sources not very parsing friendly]

Which else do you know?

I found two catalogs with a lot of links

- Wiki of Open Data Day: http://www.opendataday.org/wiki/Data

- Comunity section of data.gov: http://www.data.gov/community

DataCatalogs.org, a project from the Open Knowledge Foundation, provides a repository of Open Data catalogues across the world (currently 241):

http://datacatalogs.org/

Australia - http://data.gov.au/

New South Wales - http://data.nsw.gov.au/

The open source product is the Open Government Platform:

http://www.opengovplatform.org/

Another solution is CKAN, maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, which actually does run data.gov.uk

http://ckan.org/

http://data.gov.uk/project#q6

Cool, uses a few modules by my company, Development Seed.

I typed in "Who is on Obama's kill list?" but it just took me to the What's New? page. Meh.

I'm really excited about the possibilities of this. The exact implementation might have it's various flaws but it's an exciting move in the right direction.

The NIC? Aren't they pretty reviled as the IT arm of the Indian Govt?

It's been awhile since I've read through Drupal projects...but how much of this is usuable, extendable modules and how much of it is "Create a database and run the Drupal init script on it"?

https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform

Well https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform/tree/mast... is their custom code that should be portable as should much of the features https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform/tree/mast...

yikes, and it's Drupal 6.

What, instead of 7? Have you used 7?

/if you mean 'yikes, it's Drupal at all', yes.

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