Gobble

Gobble is the client API for Open-Spending, an international platform to package, share and visualize budget data. Gobble does exactly the same thing as the packager interface, except programatically. It can be used both as python client or a command line interface. It's compatible with versions 3.3, 3.4, 3.5. Support for 2.7 is in the works. You can install it via pip.

pip install os-gobble

Fiscal Data Packages

A generic Datapackage is a lightweight container for data. A Fiscal Data Package is a special type of data package for government budget and spending data. It's user-oriented and aims to be extremely easy to use, both for those publishing data (e.g. governments) and for those wanting to use the data (such as researchers and journalists).

Technically speaking, a fiscal datapackage consists of a JSON descriptor pointing to data files. The JSON descriptor needs to follow fiscal data specifications. A basic local fiscal data package could look like this:

/basepath/budget.json   
         /data/budget_2014.csv
               budget_2015.csv

Once your fiscal data package is ready, you can start using Gobble.

Command line interface

Asciinema to come...

Python client

Fiscal data package objects

In Gobble, fiscal data is represented by the FiscalDataPackage class. It's a sub-class of the DataPackage class, defined in the datapackage-py library. To create a FiscalDataPackage object, pass the path of your descriptor to the constructor:

user = User()
budget = FiscalDataPackage('path/to/my/package/descriptor.json', user=user)

Note that as of today, Open-Spending only supports data files in CSV format, so FiscalDataPackage will raise a NotImplementedError error if you try and pass it other formats.

Validation

To validate the fiscal datapackage schema and data:

bugdet.validate()

If the datapackage is invalid, a ValidationError will be raised. To get a list of errors instead (more helpful), set the raise_on_error flag to False.

budget.validate(raise_error=False)

Upload

To upload a fiscal data package to Open-Spending:

url = budget.upload()  # the url of your package in the Open-Spending Viewer

By default, uploaded packages are published straight away. You can toggle the publication state like so:

new_state = budget.toggle('private') # returns 'private'

Search

You can search existing fiscal data packages from the Open-Spending platform like so:

results = search('mexico')
results = search('MX', {'author': 'mickey_mouse'})

where results is a list of datapackages (dict). Available search keys are: size, title, author, description, region, country, city.

Resources

• Open-Spending web platform
• Open-Spending docs for developers
• datapackage-py package repository
• Fiscal Data Package homepage
• Open-Knowledge Foundation

License

Gobble is under MIT License.

Contributions

We welcome feedback, issues and pull-requests. Please check out the contribution guidelines.