The problem with the Socrata stuff is that it is garbage in, garbage out. Case in point, my hackathon group helped hook them up with our city and our entire ev

The problem with the Socrata stuff is that it is garbage in, garbage out. Case in point, my hackathon group helped hook them up with our city and our entire event was based on hacking this data. But the city basically did some straight sql table dumps without normalizing everything (so you would have to query multiple sets of data to make sense of anything) AND the city redacted a bunch of data, like I dunno, the frikkin relational IDs of some of the really juicy data, making it effectively worthless. Socrata is in such a land grab that it appears that they're not too interested in whether or not the data is any good. They just take what the gov'ts give them and dump it in. Maybe they've fixed that a bit since, but it was highly annoying at the time (last fall I think).