Data Artifex Socrata Toolkit

Welcome to the Socrata Toolkit documentation! This Python library provides comprehensive tools for working with Socrata open data platforms, enabling you to access datasets, generate rich metadata, and create standardized documentation.

Overview

Socrata is an open data platform designed to help government agencies and organizations publish, manage, and share data effectively. It is used by a wide range of government agencies and organizations worldwide to manage and share open data.

The Socrata Open Data Catalog, also known as the Open Data Network, is a global search engine and discovery tool for open datasets. Socrata offers a comprehensive API called the Socrata Open Data API (SODA) for accessing and interacting with datasets hosted on Socrata-powered open data portals.

Note: The Socrata platform was acquired by Tyler Technologies for $150 million, about triple the amount of investor funding Socrata had raised since its launch in 2007.

Key Features

The Socrata Toolkit provides:

  • Dataset Access: Retrieve dataset information, metadata, and statistics from Socrata servers

  • DCAT Generation: Generate W3C DCAT (Data Catalog Vocabulary) metadata using Pydantic-based RDF models

  • DDI-Codebook: Create DDI-Codebook 2.5 XML documentation for datasets

  • Croissant Metadata: Generate ML Croissant format metadata for machine learning datasets

  • Code Generation: Generate data access code in multiple languages (Python, Ruby, SAS, Stata, PowerShell, jQuery, .NET)

  • Type Safety: Built on Pydantic models with full type checking and validation

Recent Updates

Pydantic RDF Integration (February 2026): The DCAT generator has been refactored to use Pydantic-based RDF models from dartfx-rdf, providing:

  • Enhanced type safety and validation

  • Cleaner, more maintainable code

  • Automatic RDF serialization via RdfBaseModel

  • Seamless integration with the DataArtifex RDF ecosystem

Quick Start

Installation

Using uv (recommended):

uv pip install dartfx-socrata

Using pip:

pip install dartfx-socrata

Basic Usage

from dartfx.socrata import SocrataServer, SocrataDataset, DcatGenerator

# Connect to a Socrata server
server = SocrataServer(host="data.sfgov.org")

# Access a specific dataset
dataset = SocrataDataset(server=server, id="vw6y-z8j6")

# Get dataset information
print(f"Dataset: {dataset.name}")
print(f"Records: {dataset.get_record_count()}")

# Generate DCAT metadata
generator = DcatGenerator(server=server)
generator.add_dataset(dataset)
graph = generator.get_graph()

Documentation Contents

User Guide:

Indices and tables