data.gov VS sf-tree-history

data.gov may have additional material regarding Federal parcels / properties.

I wouldn't have considered any of the four bullet points "open data". I would consider

https://data.gov/

Wikidata and many other things "open". It's my own (partially true) opinion that open data is downloadable as a data dump, anything involving an API is like breathing through a straw.

Does anyone know of a data source where I could gather laws passed/blocked and their sponsors? I tried the data.gov API for legislative info, but that source limits any data dump to 250 records, far from being enough to cover any given year.

This is all completely irrelevant. No office suite user gives a shit what the Library of Congress thinks about database formats, because spreadsheets are not databases, no matter how often you personally conflate the two.

Furthermore, the LoC's job is archiving. Your links have "preservation" in the url for a reason, and "preservation" is not what people do with spreadsheets. To strive for relevance, explore https://data.gov, where CSV is abundant, because it's in use by literally hundreds of state and federal agencies, often by people using spreadsheet software, and will continue to be so for years or decades to come, whether you understand why or not.

The US Government is known for its data.gov initiative, where it has standardized the APIs across all federal agencies. This initiative has led to better consistency, security, and interoperability, thereby enhancing the data and services' value. They are used the API management tool to enforce strict encryption and access control measures, providing secure access to the vast amount of public data hosted by federal agencies.

However, for my next coursework we should be using our own datasets which should be supervised learning in nature and they cannot be from Kaggle or UCI (we lose 30 points if we use any of these sources for our datasets. I have spent about a week to look for datasets and I am a bit confused and also unable to understand which dataset to use or what kind of use cases should I look at. I did explore data.gov but I kind of just freeze because I am unable to understand what use case I can create of the database. I can't use clustering problem because that would be unsupervised in nature.

My first thought were the GIS services and catalogues listed on the Maryland state website (https://doit.maryland.gov/support/Pages/GIS.aspx) USGS National Geologic Map database (https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ngm-bin/ngm_compsearch.pl) and the more-general federal open data portal (https://data.gov/). I didn't find many promising results for "peat" on any of them, but you might have better luck.

Yes, I have opened data.gov many times but always find that most of the categories have no datasets and any dataset which is avilable have insufficient data. It's useless.

Government data: https://data.gov/

The U.S. Open Data catalog [1] has all the metadata and even some data as Linked Data, same with the European Open Data catalog [2]

[1]: https://data.gov/

I think this headline was poorly chosen.

When I see the term "Open Data" I instantly think of open data portals - mostly run by governments around the world. These things have never been healthier: ten years ago they hardly existed, today you can get civic data from local governments all over the place (last time I saw an attempt to count there were over 4,000 of these portals, and that was a few years ago).

My favourite example is still this CSV of all 190,000+ trees in San Francisco, which is updated most business days with details of the latest tree changes: https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... - I track changes to it here: https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history/

This article is about something different: it's about what I guess you could call the "Open APIs" movement. Back in the days of Web 2.0 every service was launching an open API, hoping to harness developer attention to help make the platforms more sticky. Facebook and Twitter both did incredibly well out of this strategy, at least at first.

THOSE APIs are mostly on the way out now. Companies realized that giving away their data for free has a lot of disadvantages.

Open Data is doing great. Open APIs are not.

I've been Git scraping the San Francisco version of this for a few years now.

My https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history repo now has 444 commits (most recent one was just 4 days ago) tracking every change that's been made to https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... since March 2019.

I haven't yet done anything with this data, but there is so much potential for visualizations and other fun stuff with it. If anyone wants to have a go please be my guest!

Wrote more about this project here: https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/

Trees in San Francisco: https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history