Let's up the data

[loleg]

It has been a while, 6 years more or less, since this scraper last run. There could be some code issues, though the error points to line #93, so most likely there's a minor change to the source website.

It would be nice to do this in time for Open Data Day in a couple of weeks, as we have been discussing in datasets/publicbodies#102

[loleg]

As I don't have the patience or debugging environment set up for PHP, if it were up to me I would quickly migrate this Python. Any other thoughts @hannesgassert ?

[hannesgassert]

idk, this used to run on https://scraperwiki.com once upon a time, so if we find some better place to have this run periodically I'm totally fine with that. If it's broken beyond repair we could switch from HTML scraping to LDAP access perhaps.

[loleg]

Without having to scrape anything, a call to the new staatskalender API currently returns 2 levels of structure. From this, additional calls can be made like this with the id of the corresponding federal office obtains the next levels of data, including contact details. This would be a nice strategy to update the public bodies data going forward.

[loleg]

Thanks to Raphaël Jeannerat (BK) for bringing this up at the recent hackathon, and suggesting also to look into the FEDLEX publications platform where the official / legal acts containing the government structure are available. The format is subject to improvement.