FYI. Anyone know of others maintaining basic state gov data like this?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Philip Ashlock <<email obscured>>
Date: Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 2:32 AM
Subject: Primary information for 50 states including governors and contact
info
To: <email obscured>
I'm working on a scraper to get some of the most basic information for each
state including governors and the primary contact information for the
state. Right now I'm pulling this from usa.gov, but I'm wondering if anyone
is aware of other well maintained sources for this data. I plan to be
making more improvements to the scraper over the next few days and
ultimately working to normalize it as part of a complete stack with some of
the other data I've been coalescing at http://beta.democracymap.org (which
already pulls from the open states api).
Would it make sense to incorporate this kind of basic state data into the
open states API? When my scraper is a little more polished it could provide
the data source, but since I'm currently serving as a fellow with the GSA
as part of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship I'm technically an
employee of the same office in the GSA that maintains the website this data
is being scraped from, so I'm working on a better solution to expose this
as raw data or an API directly - possibly combining it with some similar
APIs being hosted by the SBA and FCC (http://api.sba.gov/doc/geodata.htmland
http://www.fcc.gov/developers/census-block-conversions-api)
For now the scraper can be found at
https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/50_states_data/ but don't expect the
schema or even the name of the scraper to stay the same for long.
Phil
From: Philip Ashlock <<email obscured>>
Date: Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 2:32 AM
Subject: Primary information for 50 states including governors and contact
info
To: <email obscured>
I'm working on a scraper to get some of the most basic information for each
state including governors and the primary contact information for the
state. Right now I'm pulling this from usa.gov, but I'm wondering if anyone
is aware of other well maintained sources for this data. I plan to be
making more improvements to the scraper over the next few days and
ultimately working to normalize it as part of a complete stack with some of
the other data I've been coalescing at http://beta.democracymap.org (which
already pulls from the open states api).
Would it make sense to incorporate this kind of basic state data into the
open states API? When my scraper is a little more polished it could provide
the data source, but since I'm currently serving as a fellow with the GSA
as part of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship I'm technically an
employee of the same office in the GSA that maintains the website this data
is being scraped from, so I'm working on a better solution to expose this
as raw data or an API directly - possibly combining it with some similar
APIs being hosted by the SBA and FCC (http://api.sba.gov/doc/geodata.htmland
http://www.fcc.gov/developers/census-block-conversions-api)
For now the scraper can be found at
https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/50_states_data/ but don't expect the
schema or even the name of the scraper to stay the same for long.
Phil