RGovData

RGovData is a ruby library for really simple access to government data. It aims to make consuming government data sets as easy as “gem install rgovdata”, 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.

It can be used as a command line tool, a library for ruby projects, and/or a library for rails projects. The problem it is attempting to solve is

More information is available at http://rgovdata.com along with examples of it’s use.

Taking on the challenge of providing access to “all government data” is a somewhat quixotic quest for a single individual, but it could work with a community to support it! The library is open sourced under an MIT license, and the project hosted on GitHub. If you’d like to get involved, see the “Contributing to RGovData” section below.

Requirements

Objectives and Implementation Status

The following are the broad goals of the RGovData library, along with a simple statement of the current implementation status:

Note that the current version is a very early implementation. It is likely that interfaces and capabilities may be refactored or changed in subsequent versions, and not necessarily preserving backward compatibility.

Getting Started

For more details and examples, see http://rgovdata.com

Installation - Basic Gem and Command Line Usage

Make sure you have a working ruby installation, then simply:

$ gem install rgovdata

When the installation is complete, try the command line:

$ rgd
rgovdata client v0.1.0. Type 'help' for info...
rgd://sg>

Installation - Rails

Add rgovdata to your Gemfile and run bundler:

$ cat Gemfile
...
gem 'rgovdata', '~> 0.1.0'
...
$ bundle install

Data Encumberance

Although it’s all theoretically “our government data”, be aware that many of the data sets you can get to with RGovData are encumbered by copyright, commercial or other terms of use (yes, I know: wtf!).

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.

Contributing to RGovData

Running Tests

RSpec is used for testing, and it is hooked into rake. Note that integration tests are not run by default.

When you do run integration tests, they make live calls on some real services, some of which require authentication. Integration tests will use an rgovdata.conf file in the root of the project for configuration.

Copyright © 2011 Paul Gallagher and open-sourced under an MIT license. See LICENSE for further details.