This is awesome.. but are we sure this is brand new? I feel like I've seen this before (then again, I do dream about government APIs and data). I do know the page says "Last Modified Date: August 19, 2013"
Does anyone know more?
Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#12This is huge. I can't wait to use this. Now we just need the same thing from the CDC, FDA, DOJ, DOE, etc.
Some data from the CDC, FDA, and more are available from data.gov and healthdata.gov. Many agencies choose to adopt a open data platform like socrata.com (I know these guys and they rock). Is there anything specific you're looking for from CDC/FDA? Health data is my thing.
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#13+1 for not calling it a "REST API".
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#14How timely is the data? As in: When new data/reports are available, when will they be accessible via the API?
I was unable to determine if using the API could provide a first mover advantage for trading applications that take BLS data into consideration.
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#15Has anyone found a way to find series ids? I keep getting "message":["Invalid Series for Series xyz1234"]
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#16How timely is the data? As in: When new data/reports are available, when will they be accessible via the API? I was unable to determine if using the API could provide a first mover advantage for trading applications that take BLS data into consideration.
Here is a link to releases:
http://www.bls.gov/bls/newsrels.htm
I vaguely remember an article that said that some folks get the BLS data a few milliseconds faster than everyone else and avail themselves of this first mover advantage -- don't quote me on that, though. Regardless, I somehow doubt this API will be useful for first mover advantage unless perhaps you are already doing this type of technical trading in the finance industry.
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#17How timely is the data? As in: When new data/reports are available, when will they be accessible via the API? I was unable to determine if using the API could provide a first mover advantage for trading applications that take BLS data into consideration.
Here is a link to releases: http://www.bls.gov/bls/newsrels.htm I vaguely remember an article that said that some folks get the BLS data a few milliseconds faster than everyone else and avail themselves of this first mover advantage -- don't quote me on that, though. Regardless, I somehow doubt this API will be useful for first mover advantage unless perhaps you are already doing this type of technical trading in the…
You're probably referring to this Rolling Stone article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/16-major...
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#18This is huge. I can't wait to use this. Now we just need the same thing from the CDC, FDA, DOJ, DOE, etc.
Hey Alex,
I'm a Presidential Innovation Fellow focusing on open data initiatives at the FDA. I'm working to get a number of our datasets made public and available via APIs. I'd love to talk to you about what would be useful to you (and others) and how we can help. Feel free to email me at sean.herron@fda.hhs.gov if you want to chat.
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#19A couple of years ago I did a research project using the current population survey (CPS) from the BLS and I was surprised about how much interesting data there is.
I'm not sure if they've improved since 2011, but at the time it was very hard to parse and order the public data sets since the headers have changed so much over time and the data is not harmonized. I can't tell if BLS has done much data consolidation through this API, but if you're looking to consume this data I recommend just downloading it and parsing it yourself.
The IPUMS project from the University of Minnesota[1] is an excellent resource for anyone actually wanting to look at BLS / CPS data over time. They do a lot of the gruntwork for gathering CPS results across the years and synthesizing the various codes, field names, and standards into a coherent data set.
For anyone interested in actually using CPS data, a colleague and I wrote a (rather shitty) Java program to parse IPUMS data into a local longitudinal dataset. The code was written by sophomores in college, so I can't promise that this code is any good, but it's probably a good place to get started if you're interested[2].
[1] http://www.ipums.org/ [2] https://github.com/c-johnson/CPSMatcher
Re: Bureau of Labor Statistics Public Data API
#20This is huge. I can't wait to use this. Now we just need the same thing from the CDC, FDA, DOJ, DOE, etc.
Some data from the CDC, FDA, and more are available from data.gov and healthdata.gov. Many agencies choose to adopt a open data platform like socrata.com (I know these guys and they rock). Is there anything specific you're looking for from CDC/FDA? Health data is my thing.
Thanks for the advice. Shoot me an email, I'd love to ask your opinion on a couple things related to an open data project I'm doing.