About

RGovData is a ruby library for really simple access to government data. It aims to make consuming government data sets a "one liner", letting you focus on what you are trying to achieve with the data, and happily ignore all the messy underlying details of transport protocols, authentication and so on.

RGovData can be used as a command line tool, a library for ruby projects, or a library for rails projects.

One line.. srsly?

Yes! For example, this gets the number of worldwide M1+ Earthquakes in the past 7 Days (from a CSV source):

RGovData::Catalog.get('//us/eqs7day-M1/csv').records.count
(So what's the answer then?)

Or perhaps, how do I access a complete list of Libraries in Singapore? (this pulls from an OData web service):

RGovData::Catalog.get('//sg/nlb/LibrarySet').records.each { |library| puts library.Name }
(So what's the answer then?)

Resources

Contributing to RGovData

As you can see from the "Live Examples", RGovData works;-) But there's a whole shopping list of things that it could do better. In particular, the project is looking for collaborators from around the world to help adapt it to their own government data sources. See the GitHub project page for more information.

Licensing

RGovData is open-sourced under an MIT license.

Data Encumberance

Although it's all theoretically "our government data", be aware that many of the data sets you can get with RGovData may be encumbered by copyright, commercial or other terms of use.

It is up to *you* to ensure that your use of data complies with all the applicable restrictions. RGovData simply provides a mechanism for getting the data, and explicitly does not provide any rights enforcement or protection.