Germany's public-sector APIs, on your command line

What we're building

• Datasets

  In the making

  The German public web as data: a URL index of every page we fetch from around 12,000 official sources, and a content dataset of the pages someone would actually read.

• Search index

  In the making

  One API over both datasets: full-text and hybrid search, facets, and documents as they stood on a given date.

• Open-source classifiers

  In the making

  The models that tell a Drucksache, a notice or a speech from a listing, a calendar or a login page, published as open source.

How it fits together: Two datasets and a facade →

From the blog

• Two datasets and a facade

  15 October 2026

  I am modelling a crawler for the German public web. Around 12K sources: Bundestag, Bundesrat, Behörden, Kommunen, the official pages of office holders. Not their private accounts and not general media, that line is drawn at the host level and nowhere else. The back of the envelope says 200 million URLs over five years, a bit above 100K a day on average.

All posts →

Elsewhere

• Tools and Claude Code plugins

  Every command-line tool, with its own website, and the skills that teach Claude Code to use it.

• GitHub

  The source code of every tool, its issues and its releases.

• npm

  Every tool as an npm package under @maschinenlesbar.org.