Data Explorer API

[Yigal Ron]

Does the Public Data Explorer offer an API such that I can can embed
it in my site and apply it to databases of my choice?

[Benjamin Yolken]

Check out the Google Visualization API (http://code.google.com/apis/
visualization/documentation/gallery.html). That has similar types of
visualizations, which you can then embed in your site and attach to
the data sources of your choice.

-Benjamin Yolken
Product Manager, Google Public Data Explorer

[jea...@gmail.com]

I see, so we'd basically write our own "Private Data Explorer" application that hooks up to local private data in DSPL format.  Any plans for releasing the data explorer source?  Or is it a pretty straightforward combination of visualization API parts?

[martin...@gmail.com]

But I need the data source in the first place. I mean, I need an API to get the raw data from the source. How is that possible? Can you help, please.

TIA,

Martin

[igo...@gmail.com]

I am also interested in this.

Can anyone help?

[benjam...@gmail.com]

Any recent news on this?
I am also quite interested in being able to link the data explorer with other data...
Thanks, Ben

[curran....@gmail.com]

Greetings,

I am a Ph. D. student looking for public data sets to use in a visualization-related project. I would like to access the data sets inside the Google Public Data repository, but it seems these data sets are not made publicly available in any machine-readable form. Is this truly the case? Is there any way to download a dump of a public data set, or access its content through an API?

Clearly the Google Public Data data sets have been preprocessed and curated, presumably using DSPL (Dataset Publishing Language), but I see no way to access the data except by using Google's public data browser visualization tool. In the DSPL pages, there is a listing of examples, but this listing does not contain the data sets exposed in the Public Data browser.

Is it possible to get a DSPL dump of a given data set? This seems straightforward to expose, as data sets were likely put into this format first before submission into the public data repository. If not, what is the reason these are not made available? Does anyone know of any data sets published external to Google using DSPL that are publicly available?

The public data browser is making API calls to fetch the data (of the form http://www.google.com/publicdata/query?session=KSmAqCgH8js&jsq=%7B%22apiVersion%22 ...). The API is unclear and difficult to reverse engineer, and it seems like Google may not want people using it. Is there any documentation for using this API in our own applications, or is this API proprietary and forbidden for use?

Also here is another related discussion on StackOverflow.

It seems that I and any others interested in using this data will be downloading and preprocessing the data sets from the original sources ourselves, wrangling with the numerous different file formats and access methods of the various data providers. We will be duplicating the many hours of work already done by the Google Public Data project, because Google chose to keep the results from the "Public Data" project decidedly non-public. I'm hoping this is not the case ;) Thank you in advance for any response from the Google team.

Best regards,

Curran Kelleher

[katievan...@gmail.com]

I am also interested in this. A lot of the data is publicly available but working with government api's has been a real pain. Is there any way this can be opened up? Google api's are like rainbows and candy by comparison.  

[fett.n...@yahoo.com]

Little late, but thought I'd add that I had some luck emailing the agency that uploads it (BLS in my case).  Just look for the right person to email and they should give it to you since its public data and they have to upload it themselves