I learned about a great open government initiative while at YAPC::NA 2009:
disclosed.ca. Disclosed scrapes data about federal contracts from the dozens of websites representing Canadian public agencies and organizations (like the Canada Revenue Agency and the Correctional Service of Canada).
The information is aggregated, graphed, linked, and made searchable. It's a wonderful tool and a perfect example of the one, eternal, true API: automated web scraping with
Perl :)
Are there similar projects for other nations? Anyone know about similar data sources for America?
For the USA, I think data.gov is what you're looking for:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.data.gov/
Chris