Russian government public API documentation

Russian government publishes a lot of open data and provides several API from government information systems. This data and API is mostly undocumented. We find it, we document it and share it.

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by our ongoing search for high-quality datasets published in Russia. Other our projects like spending.gov.ru, clearspending.ru, apicrafter.ru use these datasets, and we are always eager to find more and better data. Also, we need to make sure to have a copy of officially published data, so we develop API backup tools to download all data from data API.

What it does

It documents the public undocumented API provided by Russian government information systems.

How we built it

We have a large list of API's, Information systems, datasets and other data artifacts related to Russian government open data.

Challenges we ran into

Complete lack of documentation, sometimes it takes time to find certain parameters used for API requests. It takes time to intercept how browsers access data using AJAX requests.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Several major governments APIs covered and it's great that we were able to do it.

What we learned

This work could be half-automatic. Some types of API, like OData API, could be described automatically. Some tests could be generated automatically.

What's next for Russian government public API documentation

  1. Not everything covered about government API. We have more information systems with public undocumented API, and we will add them all step-by-step.
  2. We have several undocumented API in our Airtable base, and we are going to create other API's lists online
  3. We will automate our open data backup efforts to collect data using tools like APIBackuper automatically. OOur National digital archive team developed this tool to do copies of all data provided as API.

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