open data - who shall catalogue the catalogues?

Open data catalogues are proliferating worldwide, at the municipal, state/province, and national levels, and even beyond national (e.g. OECD, World Bank).

Maintaining and sharing the list of these resources would seem to me to be an area where librarians could provide their expertise.

Just off the top of my head, I know of four five lists, there are probably many more (I'm pretty sure there are a lot of Google Docs spreadsheets out there).  All are incomplete.  I myself maintain a separate list just for Canada on Wikipedia, which is probably also incomplete.

• GovLoop - List of City-wide Data sites (actually covers many levels of government)
• Guardian - Data Store: World Government Data
• Open Government Data - Lists of open government data catalogues
• Sunlight Labs Wiki - Government data catalogs
• UPDATE: Data.gov Community
• Wikipedia - Open Data in Canada

If you want an example of a missing site, only the Wikipedia page lists the URL for Calgary's site.

How should we address this?  Should we build a global list in Wikipedia?  Or a single shared spreadsheet?  Or just use appropriate textual and embedded semantic markup on every data catalogue, so that they can all be identified, crawled and linked programmatically?

Thanks to James Hendler (@jahendler) for sparking this blog posting.

UPDATE 2011-01-20: Another list along with lots of other links at http://wiki.civiccommons.org/

Comments

[Jonathan Gray]

For what its worth, while at the moment we're maintaining source lists in several places for different purposes, at the Open Knowledge Foundation we're also actively researching and developing different ways of federating information from different sources from a single point of access. Our vision is that this will be maintained by a community of people interested in government data, with lots of different hooks to lots of other different services. All code and data will (of course) be fully open. Watch this space! ;-)