Herewith is a report on recent improvements to PublicBodies.org, our project in Open Knowledge Foundation Labs project to provide “a URL (and information) on every “public body” – that’s every government funded agency, department or organization.

New data

New data contributed over the last couple of months is now validated and live – this includes new data for Switzerland, Greece, Brazil and the US. Huge thank-you to contributors here including Hannes, Charalampos, Augusto and Todd.

We also have pending data for Italy and China to get in once it has been reviewed, and we have data in progress for Canada!

We’d love to have more data – if you’re interested in contributing see https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies#contribute-data

Updated Schema for Data

Thanks to input from James McKinney and others we’ve reworked the schema quite extensively to match up as much as possible with the Popolo spec. You can see the new schema in the datapackage.json.

Or if you don’t like raw JSON so much in prettier HTML version on: http://data.okfn.org/community/okfn/publicbodies

Search support

We now have basic search support via google custom search: http://publicbodies.org/search

Get Involved

As always we’d love help! There is a full list of issues here and example items:

• Getting Descriptions for 130 EU Public Bodies
• Support for sending corrections / additions on the website
• Support for reconciliation (e.g. via nomenklatura)

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