Important links: Info and Guides | Contributing | Development Setup
Image courtesy of Isaac Wedin under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
Databuoy is a spreadsheet-backed data catalog that anyone can put online for free. It helps organizations compile a machine-readable data inventory while simultaneously creating a public website that presents it. With Databuoy, this spreadsheet turns into this website.
If you're a developer, you can read about deployment here. If not, you can deploy the site too! Read on!
Databuoy draws its data from a publicly viewable spreadsheet. Whenever that spreadsheet is updated, the website will be updated as well. That spreadsheet can either be in the form of a Google Sheet (which updates automatically) or a .csv file (which must be manually updated on GitHub).
Databuoy uses GitHub Pages to automatically provide a free, publicly-accessible website. By copying Databuoy's open-source code on GitHub ("forking" it) and pasting your spreadsheet's URL into the data_location file, you'll have a website at https://your_github_username.github.io/databuoy. You can even set up a custom domain name!
Yes! You should just make a copy this example spreadsheet whose columns are based on the US Federal Government's Project Open Data Metadata Schema v1.1.
No! The schema allows for datasets that are not public, so people can know about a dataset, even if they don't have access to its contents (that way, we can know that the police have a list_of_criminals_unfit_for_public_circulation.xls file, even if we can't see who's in it).
Check out our setup guides for developers and non-developers.
Databuoy can export to the Project Open Data Metadata Schema (v1.1), but the official converters are a better route.
Check out our Contributing and Development Setup guides.