New site, new datasets.

Since creating Richmond Sunlight and Virginia Decoded, I’ve been building up a public trove of datasets about Virginia government: legislative video, the court system’s definitions of legal terms, court rulings, all registered dangerous dogs, etc. But they’re all scattered about on different websites. A couple of years ago, I slapped together a quick site to list all of them, but I outgrew it pretty quickly.

So now I’m launching a new site: the Open Virginia data repository. It’s an implementation of the excellent CKAN data repository software (which will soon drive Data.gov). The idea is to provide a single, searchable, extensible website where every known state dataset can be listed, making them easy to find and interact with. It’s built on the industry’s best software, in part because I’m hopeful that, eventually, I can persuade Virginia to simply take the site from me, to establish a long-overdue data.virginia.gov.

There are a few new datasets that accompany this launch:

• The Dangerous Dog Registry as JSON, meaning that programmers can take these records and do something interesting with them. (Imagine an iPhone app that tells you when you’re close to a registered dangerous dog.) Previously I provided this only as HTML.
• VDOT 511 Geodata. This is the GeoJSON that powers Virginia 511, exposed here for the first time. Road work, traffic cameras, accidents—all kinds of great data, updated constantly, with each GeoJSON feed listed here.
• Public comments on proposed regulations. Over 28,000 comments have been posted by members of the public about regulations to the Virginia Regulatory Town Hall site over the past decade. Now they’re all available in a single file (formatted as JSON), for programmers to do interesting things with.

There’s so much more to come—good datasets already available, and datasets that need to be scraped from government sites and normalized—but this is a good start. I’m optimistic that providing an open, accessible home for this data will encourage others to join in and help create a comprehensive collection of data about the Virginia government and its services.