readme.md

German Government Domains

An incomplete listing of german government domains (and the code for the scraper used to build the list).

You can download the list as a .csv file or view it with github's pretty formatting.

We try to use the same format as the US GSA (example), so the CSV file has a header of Domain Name,Domain Type,Agency,City,State and currently contains government agencies and cities.

Variants

If you only want a subset of the available data, variants filtered by Domain Type are provided:

• data/domains.csv contains everything
• data/domains.federal.csv contains only government agencies (Federal Agency)
• data/domains.cities.csv contains only cities (City)

Why?

There currently isn't a publicly available directory of all the domain names registered by the german government and its agencies. Such a directory would be useful for people looking to get an aggregate view of government websites and how they are hosted. For example, Ben Balter has been doing some great work analyzing the official set of US .gov domains.

This is by no means an official or a complete list. It is intended to be a first step toward a better understanding of how the government is managing its official sites.

What can I do with it?

• Plug the CSV into 18F/domain-scan to get more data (like HTTPS support) about the domains
• Check the IPv6 reachability
• Test if the sites are reachable even without the www. subdomain
• ...?

How to update

The list is populated by scrapers and static files and merged by a makefile. To run the process yourself, checkout this repository and run:

bundle install
make

After everything ran, you can look into data/domains.csv.

Scrapers and Sources

• bundde-behoerden-scraper.rb: crawls an official government agency list.
• wikidata-cities.rb: uses a sparql query to get cities with their domains from Wikidata.
• data/source/bmf.csv: list from BMF, manually extracted from their digital services page on bundesfinanzministerium.de
• data/source/ifg-bka.csv: is a list from BKA, aquired with a freedom of information request
• data/source/ifg-bmas.csv: is a list from BMAS, aquired with a freedom of information request
• data/source/ifg-bmvi.csv: is a list from BMVI, aquired with a freedom of information request
• data/source/ifg-bt.csv: is a list from Bundestag, aquired with a freedom of information request
• data/source/ifg-bva.csv: is a list from Bva, aquired with a freedom of information request
• data/source/ifg-dwd.csv: is a list from DWD, aquired with a freedom of information request
• data/source/overrides.csv: manually curated list of domains for which the scraper returns a wrong agency name
• data/source/reverse-dns.csv: DNS lookup of 77.87.224.0/21, sites manually visited and picked

Contributing

I'd love to have some help with this! Please feel free to create an issue or submit a pull request if you notice something that can be better. Specifically, suggesting additional pages we can scrape and domains that are either not found or have incorrect organization names associated with them would be very helpful.

Ideas

• scrape even more domains
  • scrape news articles on already known government sites
  • use the list of projects using the Government Site Builder
  • use a wikidata query to get the website property of agencies listed in wikipedia category pages
• manual collection
  • try to get some domains with an freedom of information request
  • look for domains in minor interpellations

Thanks

Thanks to @esonderegger for the dotmil domains project that served as an template for this repo.