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?
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