CIA World Factbook

[rufuspollock]

CIA world factbook is a top candidate for being data packagized ...

/cc @geraldb - i see you've been doing some work around this recently

[geraldb]

@rgrp You're more than welcome to (re)use what you can, see - /opendatajson/factbook.json for country profiles datasets in JSON. If anyone is interested some background and talks notes titled "factbook.json - Turn the World Factbook into Open (Structured) Data".

About packaging - the factbook is more document-oriented (thus, "nested" JSON datasets to include everything incl. inconsistencies and "known" errors/typos etc.). Adding a subset, however, would work great for (one or more) tabular data packages (in CSV). Keep up the great work on datapackage.json and friends. Cheers.

[rufuspollock]

@geraldb awesome. Do you have any notes on the factbook structure and any scraping code to point to? (BTW: I remember scraping the factbook almost 10y ago in python but, typically, can't locate my code now!)

[geraldb]

@rgrp Sure. More than welcome. All code and scripts public domain. The ruby script (packaged as a gem) -> /factbook/factbook. All codes in csv /factbook/data/codes.csv and (most) categories mapped to attributes factbook/data/attributes.yml. That's the "real world" auto-generated list - factbook/CATEGORIES.md with a counter how many profile use the category. And if interested - there's a build script - to automate fetching and generating the datasets - /yorobot/factbook. Again everybody welcome to (re)use whatever you can. All public domain (dedicated). Cheers.

[rufuspollock]

@geraldb i'm quite interested in trying to (tabular) data package this. Do you have an SQL version of the data - that would be the easiest to convert to CSV.

Also i looked briefly at the yorobot scripts but wasn't sure the best place to start -- any tips?

/cc @Mikanebu

[geraldb]

@rufuspollock Thanks again for the interest in packaging the factbook datasets. Love the (tabular) data packages.

As written before - this factbook repo and approach maps the original CIA factbook data sources (in html pages) with minimal clean-up 1:1 to "document-oriented" datasets. One "country" page one json dataset. An example, is France (which includes Metroplitan France and its overseas territories in a single country document, for example). Thus, as is you cannot map it without extra mapping to tabular structured data.

The good news. @iancoleman has written an alternative factbook parser [1] that includes much more clean-ups and mappings, and, thus, might be way easier to use for packing up in tabular datasets.

[1] https://github.com/iancoleman/cia_world_factbook_api#data

Maybe @iancoleman can comment? By the way, great initiative / project. Always great to see alternatives / new factbook parsers / datasets / projects.

Or maybe repost or open an issue / ticket on at the iancleman's cia_world_factbook_api repo to get things started over there.

Again thanks for the update and interest. Keep it up.

/cc @Mikanebu

[rufuspollock]

@geraldb thanks for the great suggestions.

@iancoleman - any thoughts? Also do you have a schema for your data anywhere? Would it be possible make a table schema (https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/table-schema/) for it?

[iancoleman]

For tabular data, have a quick look at https://iancoleman.github.io/explorer-cia-world-factbook/ which can create csv output; needs a bit of ux attention (eg a select all columns button, handle lists etc) but let me know if this is along the lines you're looking for.

There isn't a formal schema but once the parser is a bit more mature this will happen. See iancoleman/cia_world_factbook_api#7

As for data being packagized, could you elaborate a bit more on that? I've somewhat bundled the data, see the 'data' section of the readme but it sounds like you're going for something a bit more formal...?

[rufuspollock]

@iancoleman i'm thinking about packaging (some of the data) as tabular data packages:

http://frictionlessdata.io/data-packages/
http://frictionlessdata.io/guides/tabular-data-package/

https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/tabular-data-resource/

Especially adding a Table Schema https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/table-schema/

[iancoleman]

Thanks for the additional info. At this stage no plan for packaging, but it will happen at some point. I'll be tracking progress in iancoleman/cia_world_factbook_api#7 so if there's any further info you think may be beneficial please post it in that issue.