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With APIs, you let other developers do your R&D for you. The benefit? You get development at scale with minimal investment. You effectively outsource risk because failures don’t cost you anything.

It’s easy to envision how brands whose core business revolves around technology or data could make use of an API

By providing access to that value through an API, they would allow the delivery of that value to spread exponentially.

112th Congress live in Congress API

all members of the 112th Congress are now available in our Congress API

All members are now added along with their ids on other sites

ScraperWiki: a website where people can write and repair public web scrapers and invent uses for the data

we announce TileMill, a project that brings map design to new audiences and pushes a modular, open source stack that's fast, easy to use, and intelligent

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved landmark legislation to overhaul the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a reform effort more than half a decade in the making that aims to improve the quality of patents and curb frivolous litigation.

Excluded from the bill was a controversial amendment, backed by many tech companies, that would have eased the process for initiating an in-house administrative review process at the Patent Office for challenges to patents that have been granted, a measure billed as a less costly alternative to private litigation.

The Senate bill would transition the Patent Office to a so-called first-to-file system, bringing the U.S. system in line with the patent regimes of much of the rest of the world. The shift would confer patent rights on the first inventor or company to file an application, rather than the current first-to-invent system

Probase is a Microsoft Research project described as an "ongoing project that focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge serving." Its primary goal is to "enable machines to understand human behavior and human communication.

The report finds that 3 key groups or ‘layers’ were crucial to the successful introduction of open data. An influential and active civil society provided the ‘bottom up’ pressure for change through traditional advocacy and by setting up innovative websites demonstrating how open information could be used. Civil servants and state and federal administrators who saw open data as a way of improving efficiency provided the ‘middle layer’. Finally, high-level political leaders including Heads of States and Ministers provided the third layer.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. Use digress.it to collectively dissect public documents like political speeches, corporate contracts or government transcripts.

digress.it makes this private space public, allowing communities of readers to turn documents into conversations

ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor.

It should come as no surprise to readers of Datablog that, as editor Simon Rogers puts it himself, "we are drowning in data." We suddenly find ourselves with unprecedented access to torrents of data that could be used to better society.

To help bridge the gap between socially minded organizations and do-good dataists, we started a project temporarily dubbed "Data Without Borders".