Contribute to Data Commons!

Data Commons has benefited greatly from our collaborations with different government organizations and academic institutions and is looking to expand the set of collaborative projects. In particular, we are looking for partners to:

Data Commons welcomes patches and contributions to this project from everyone, new or experienced!

Ways to contribute

Add data

We welcome contributions of public data to the Data Commons Graph. Data added will be accessible via Data Commons tools and APIs. We’ve bootstrapped the graph with these datasets from US Census, World Bank, CDC, NOAA, NASA, etc. However, Data Commons is meant to be for the community, by the community. We’re excited to work with you to make public data accessible to everyone. To get started, please take a look at these resources and follow this development process. Here is a list of imports that would be helpful to add.

Create new curriculum

Data Commons allows for easy acess to real data that can enrich the experience of students and instructors in educational contexts. We’re posting template data science assignments to assist educators with integrating real data into their courses on the courseware page. If you use Data Commons for your classes, have courseware to share, or find any of this material helpful, we want to hear about it! Please fill out this form.

Creating a new tool

Data Commons welcomes the development of new tools that make the data on Data Commons more accessible to end users. We have an extensive REST API that can be used to power applications on top of our data. If you would like to build a new tool, contact the team through this form or create a PR in the Data Commons tools repo.

Sharing analysis

Data Commons is currently posting example analyses on the case studies page. To add your analysis on that page, open a PR in the Data Commons documentation repo with the title of the analysis and links to its Colab notebook and Github raw .ipynb file.

Updating documentation

Data Commons maintains its documentation website at https://docs.datacommons.org. You can submit a PR to update the project’s documentation at https://github.com/datacommonsorg/docsite/pulls.

Getting started

Signing the Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution; this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project. Head over to https://cla.developers.google.com/ to see your current agreements on file or to sign a new one.

You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you’ve already submitted one (even if it was for a different project), you probably don’t need to do it again.

Becoming familiar with the project

You can read about our data models and explore existing data and tools on datacommons.org.

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. Data Commons uses GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

This project follows Google’s code style guide, documentation style guide, and open source community guidelines.

Other ways to get involved

  • If you have a concern or a suggested feature, feel free to open an issue on Github.
  • Share feedback with the team through this form.