France starts opening its data

It's a goldmine, there are 350k datasets available, and a lot of them that will not make some people happy (criminality by geographic zone for example).<p>It opens possibilities to create a really nice multi-factor (e.g. crime, pollution, education) "best place to live" application.<p>A lot of the data is available in a very manageable CSV, sadly some is only available in XLS that may be a bit harder to manipulate programmaticaly.

This is a lot more data than I expected for a launch! I guess they wanted to get a lot of stuff organized before going public with it. Looks like some useful data that wasn't previously publicly available (or available under a free-enough license), from some brief skimming. There's some discussion on the French OpenStreetMap list about using it in semi-automated fashion to improve French coverage on OSM, especially for things like landmarks and landforms outside of the major cities, or adding metadata to existing landmark nodes.

Good news, for once french gov shows the way.

it's a step in the right direction but why isn't there an API ? seriously