Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 18, 2013

Freeing the Plum Book

Filed under: Government,Government Data,Transparency — Patrick Durusau @ 7:15 pm

Freeing the Plum Book by Derek Willis.

From the post:

The federal government produces reams of publications, ranging from the useful to the esoteric. Pick a topic, and in most cases you’ll find a relevant government publication: for example, recent Times articles about presidential appointments draw on the Plum Book. Published annually by either the House or the Senate (the task alternates between committees), the Plum Book is a snapshot of appointments throughout the federal government.

The Plum Book is clearly a useful resource for reporters. But like many products of the Government Printing Office, its two main publication formats are print and PDF. That means the digital version isn’t particularly searchable, unless you count Ctrl-F as a legitimate search mechanism. And that’s a shame, because the Plum Book is basically a long list of names, positions and salary information. It’s data.

Derek describes freeing the Plum Book from less than useful formats.

It is now available in JSON and YAML formats at Github and in Excel.

Curious, what other public datasets would you want to match up to the Plum Book?

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