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Sources The Data .dev Family

SourcesThe data family

The Data .dev Family

A group of free public-data sites, one per subject, that republish government and research data in one shared format with keyless APIs and versioned URLs you can cite.

Type
Source
Tested
Updated
Read
5 min
Steps
4
Sources
8

What it is

The data .dev family is a set of free public-data sites, one per subject: air, carbon, climate, the economy, elections, health, housing, crime, satellites, water and wildfires. Each one takes data that an agency or research group already publishes, such as EPA, NOAA, BLS, the Census Bureau or the FBI, and republishes it as plain files and a simple API. Like this site, the family is run by Eric Ness, who says so on the visualizedata.org About page. Read these pages with that in mind.

None of the sites produce original measurements. Their job is to make the agencies’ numbers easier to get, compare and cite. Two related sites sit on top: visualizedata.dev serves charts and map boundaries, and visualizedata.org draws charts from the data. A third, satellitedata.net, works differently (see below).

What it measures

Each site has its own page here.

  • airdata.dev: daily and yearly Air Quality Index for US counties from 1980, from EPA’s AirData and AirNow.
  • carbondata.dev: emission factors for carbon accounting, and national fossil CO2 from the Global Carbon Project.
  • climatedata.dev: monthly county temperature and precipitation since 1895 from NOAA, plus global temperature and greenhouse-gas records.
  • economicdata.dev: unemployment, jobs, wages and income for US places from BLS, BEA and the Census Bureau, and World Bank country indicators.
  • electiondata.dev: US Senate, House and county presidential results, from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab.
  • healthdata.dev: CDC provisional overdose deaths, Census estimates of the uninsured, and kindergarten vaccination by state.
  • housingdata.dev: FHFA house price indexes and Census building permits by county.
  • justicedata.dev: crimes reported to the FBI each month by state since 2018.
  • satellitedata.dev: a catalog of objects in orbit, current orbital elements and a launch log.
  • waterdata.dev: daily USGS streamflow and weekly county drought categories over the last 400 days.
  • wildfiredata.dev: satellite fire detections in the US and Canada, linked to official incidents and perimeters.
  • visualizedata.dev: ready-made charts, embeds and GeoJSON map boundaries for the other sites.
  • satellitedata.net: Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery rendered on demand.
  • visualizedata.org: charts and maps of public indicators, built from the family’s data.

What the .dev sites share, as their home pages and docs state:

  • One format. Every site uses the same URL scheme (/v1/catalog, /v1/{dataset}, /v1/{dataset}/{series}/{location}.json) and one place-ID scheme across all the sites: lowercase ISO codes for countries, us-ca for states, us-county- plus the five-digit FIPS code for counties. A county ID from one site works on another.
  • No key. Each site serves JSON, CSV or Parquet files over HTTPS with no key or signup. The docs give an anonymous limit of 120 requests a minute from one IP address.
  • Versions you can cite. Every update gets a version ID, and a URL pinned to that version always returns the same data. The first version of each month is kept for good, and the docs say to cite those.
  • Checks before publishing. Each update is validated first. If a check fails, the last good version stays live, and a status page shows whether each dataset is current.
  • Source and license per dataset. Every dataset names its source, its license, whether commercial use is allowed and the exact credit line to use. Each JSON file repeats the license and credit.

satellitedata.net is the exception. It serves imagery, not tables, and its API needs a key (a free one, with a no-key demo).

What it misses

A copy is never better than the original. Each site republishes someone else’s numbers, so every limit of the upstream data carries over: EPA monitors don’t cover every county, FBI figures count only crimes reported by agencies that report, CDC overdose counts are provisional. Each site’s page here covers its own source’s limits.

A copy can add its own errors. Reshaping data means choices: joining two sources, deriving a value, picking a coverage window. The sites document these choices (airdata.dev, for example, computes recent county AQI values itself), but a bug in the pipeline would show up in every file. A copy can also lag the agency, so the newest figure may not be there yet.

Windows are the site’s choice. Some sites keep a short window rather than the agency’s full history. waterdata.dev keeps 400 days of streamflow, though USGS holds decades.

One person runs it. The About page on visualizedata.org names a single person who builds and runs these sites. The site pages checked for this profile name no institution, funder or long-term plan behind them. The promise to keep monthly snapshots “for good” rests on that one operator. For a paper, report or anything high-stakes, check key figures against the agency’s own release and cite the agency.

How to access it

1Pick the site for your subject

Each site’s home page lists its datasets with coverage and update schedules. The dataset pages show the schema, the credit line and every endpoint.

2Read the catalog

Each site has a catalog at https://api.{site}/v1/catalog, listing every dataset with its current version and coverage. On 2026-11-14 the catalog for each of the twelve .dev sites answered without a key, for example https://api.airdata.dev/v1/catalog (2 datasets) and https://api.economicdata.dev/v1/catalog (5 datasets).

3Get one series or the whole dataset

One series for one place is /v1/{dataset}/{series}/{location}.csv. Because the place IDs are shared, the same county code works across sites: https://api.climatedata.dev/v1/county-climate/tavg/us-county-06037.csv and https://api.waterdata.dev/v1/drought-county/area/us-county-06037.csv both returned Los Angeles County data when tested. For a whole dataset, use /v1/{dataset}/download/{dataset}.csv or .parquet.

4Read the docs

Each site’s /docs/ page covers URLs, IDs, formats, versions, caching, errors and rate limits, and /docs/reference/ lists the exact URLs. Start with airdata.dev/docs/; the others follow the same layout.

How to cite it

Cite two things: the agency that produced the numbers, and the exact version you used.

  • Credit the agency with the credit line on the dataset page or the site’s /sources/ page. It is also in the attribution field of every JSON file.
  • Pin the version. /v1/{dataset}/versions lists the current version and the monthly snapshots. Put the version after the dataset ID with @, as in /v1/county-aqi-annual@2026-10-26.271cefd8c0/.... Cite a monthly snapshot, since other versions may be removed after 30 days.
  • Add the access date, and say if any values were provisional or preliminary.

A worked example:

US Environmental Protection Agency, Air Quality System Data Mart, annual AQI summary for Los Angeles County, CA. Retrieved via airdata.dev, county-aqi-annual version 2026-10-26.271cefd8c0, https://api.airdata.dev/v1/county-aqi-annual@2026-10-26.271cefd8c0/summary/us-county-06037.csv, accessed 14 November 2026.

Sources & further reading

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