Public Bodies

A database of public bodies (or organizations):

Examples are:

• Government Ministries or Departments
• State-run Health organizations
• Police and fire departments

Visit the site: https://publicbodies.org/

Data

Data is stored in CSVs partitioned by country or region (e.g. EU) in the data folder. Files are named by two-letter ISO code.

Contribute data

Please just add a CSV file and submit a pull request or open an issue.

The set of fields required in the CSV file can be seen in the field list on: public-body-schema.json. You can also check out the existing data in data/ for hints. To learn more about Data Packages, visit https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/.

If you can, developing a bot to automatically and periodically collect the data is even better.

For developers of the website

The website is a Jekyll site. To get it running locally:

1. Install Docker.

2. Get the code

   git clone https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies
   cd publicbodies
   

3. Run Jekyll

   cd website
   export JEKYLL_VERSION=4.2.0
   docker run --rm --volume="$PWD:/srv/jekyll" -it jekyll/minimal:$JEKYLL_VERSION jekyll build --baseurl $PWD/_site/ --watch
   

   The built website will appear on the website/_site folder.

The list of outstanding issues is at: https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies/issues

For developers of data collector bots

Data is kept automatically up-to-date by bots that collect and update data once a week. The scripts are kept on the scripts/import directory, followed by the international place code (e.g. br for Brazil, it for Italy).

The script MUST be runnable from a command line interface. It should display the available options if run with the --help parameter, and output data to the file chosen by the --output parameter. For example:

python3 scripts/import/br/import_br.py --help

usage: import_br.py [-h] [--output file_name]

Imports Brazilian public body data from the official source and complements it
with data from several auxiliary sources. Official source: [SIORG's open data
API](https://dados.gov.br/dataset/siorg)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help          show this help message and exit
  --output file_name  filename for the data output as CSV

When making requests, bots MUST use the Public Bodies Bot user agent string to identify themselves to servers:

PublicBodiesBot (https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies)

If using Python, use the same libraries already defined in scrips/requirements.txt, in order to keep the project dependencies tidy, and only add new ones if strictly necessary.

After creating a new bot, make sure to add it to the update data workflow so that it runs regularly and keeps the data up-to-date.

Original preparation

Details of the automated data extraction to build the original database.

Data sources:

• Brazil
  • Brazilian Government's SIORG – https://dados.gov.br/dataset/siorg
• European Union
  • AskTheEU.org
• Italy
  • Opendata IPA (amministrazioni / enti)
• Germany
  • FragDenStaat.de – (private GoogleDoc)
  • Bund.de – https://www.bund.de/Content/DE/Behoerden/Suche/Formular.html
• United Kingdom
  • WhatDoTheyKnow.com – https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/all-authorities.csv
• United States of America
  • A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies – https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/a