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RESTful Interface for Government Data

Why Is This Idea Important?: There are a wide range of formats for government data, this presents large hurdles to develop software applications to analyze, publicize, increase efficiencies using this data. If this data were available through web services (REST is proposed here) the hurdles to develop these applications would be considerably lowered. One example is the Budget, Eric Bowman has already suggested an XML Document for Budget. http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/2628-4049 Taking this a step further, for all tabular data (e.g. databases) and providing a RESTful service would extremely useful. I'm sure that we could round up volunteers to write applications to convert the existing data from the various formats to one or more standard formats (XML, JSON, CSV for example). It would then be straight forward to host this on one of the available cloud infrastructures (Google, Amazon etc.). This would allow this to be done at no cost to the taxpayer, presuming that the cloud infrastructure providers would provide the service at no cost (Eric? Joe? Larry?, Sergey?). Other technologies, SOAP, OSGi, may also be reasonable. However considering that all of the access would be read only, and authorization requirements are low, REST would be more than adequate. I will be posting an example at http://www.foundobjx.com/maggie/npi on June 10, for locating physicians (data from the Health and human services site).

Provide a REST interface to appropriate available government data.

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Submitted by derek61 3 years ago

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Comments (2)

  1. tolynette

    Pardon, but what is REST?

    3 years ago
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  2. derek61

    REST is an acronym that stands for Representational State Transfer. It is an approach that was pioneered by Roy Fielding in 2000. REST uses four of the HTTP verbs: POST, PUT, GET, and DELETE to manipulate resources and state. It is an alternative to technologies such as RCP, SOAP, and CORBA (and others). See wikipedia for more, or Roy Fielding's (UCI) 2000 dissertation.

    3 years ago
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