Our friends at the US Open Data Institute work to make it easier for governments and others to open their data. One of the first things a government agency must do before launching an open data repository is conduct an inventory of the data they’re already publishing. It lets you get everything in one place. This is a relatively minor step to creating an open data policy and repository, but it still takes work. We were thrilled to learn that the US Open Data Institute team, including Waldo Jaquith, Ted Han, and Dan Schultz, used the Bing Search API to create a tool that radically streamlines the data inventory process.
It’s called Let Me Get That Data For You. All you have to do is enter in a website URL, and it will search that domain for common data formats and return a machine-readable list for you to use. And then you’re on step closer to sharing your data with the world.
As of today, the service will return up to 2,000 datasets per search. This should cover many of the intended use cases, but if you’re working with an extreme case, you can head over to Github and run the open source code yourself.