Public data put to good use.

Datamob aims to show, in a very simple way, how public data sources are being used.

Our listings emphasize the connection between data posted by governments and public institutions and the interfaces people are building to explore that data.

It's for anyone who's ever looked at a site like MAPLight.org and wondered, "Where did they get their data?" And for anyone who ever looked at THOMAS and thought, "There's got to be a better way to organize this!"

Our name takes artistic license with the term "data mob," which the folks at Freebase use to describe a group of data-lovers working together to perfect a small portion of the Freebase database.

our mission

Encourage governments and public institutions to make more data available in developer-friendly formats and accessible via APIs. Accessible public data enables informed civic engagement, and we believe that providing restriction-free data to developers is the best way to promote the technological innovations that will spread knowledge.
Illuminate the process of creating interfaces, mashups and visualizations for public data, and inspire people to create new ones.

how to use

Use the tags under each tab to sort listings according to your interests—you can find datasets tagged with "government" or interfaces that use Flash. View the listing for CIA World Factbook and you'll see that NationMaster uses it as a data source along with 6 other data sources listed on Datamob. Know of a data source used by NationMaster that we're missing? Submit it and help connect the dots. Have tips on working with any of these data sources? Add a comment.

RSS feeds are available for almost everything you see—datasets, interfaces, resources, tags, comments and the site as a whole. You can also follow Datamob on Twitter.

how to help

Contribute knowledge of great data sources and interfaces. Our aim is not to become the most comprehensive directory of large datasets—Infochimps and CKAN have that covered—but rather the best place to see how public data is being put to use online. Pointers to interfaces and developer-friendly data sources that don't require screen scraping are welcome and needed. Note that we don't host the data, but point to sites where you can access it.

colophon

Datamob was built with Rails in New York City by Sean Flannagan and Lauren Sperber using Heroku, a collaborative, web-based Rails development environment. It's hosted by HostingRails and sports valid XHTML strict and CSS.

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stats

Datamob currently lists 217 datasets, 158 interfaces and 64 resources, which are categorized by 66 tags. It's sort of like this: