The Edlink Public Data Initiative

The inspiration for this project comes from years of firsthand frustration. If you've worked in the education space for more than a couple of years, you probably know the struggle of tracking down clean, accurate data about schools, districts, universities, and companies. We're right there with you, and we decided to do something about it.

We are on a mission to build the most complete and correct repository of public information about learning institutions and educational vendors ever assembled. Here is a look at what we are building, why we are making it entirely free, and how you can get involved.

At its core, this project is a comprehensive database of educational entities. But more importantly, it is built to be used.

• You can access the data via the web, API, or our embeddable UI widgets.
• We actively encourage you to integrate this information into your own products.
• Our terms of service are designed to be open and developer-friendly.

Using this structured information in your products can also help school districts and LEAs stay organized and on top of their own data. By establishing a common source of truth, we can help prevent the errors and mitigate the risks that go along with them.

We've made it incredibly simple to start leveraging this repository in your own workflow: Sign up, create API keys, and start building.

Here are some sample use cases to help you get started.

Data like this is often locked behind paywalls. We took a different approach for a few reasons.

1. We need the support of the community. We can't do it all ourselves. Even with LLMs, we need your help to maintain and verify this data.
2. Walled gardens don't work when you're building a product that needs broad adoption to be useful. We believe we can create a truly authoritative data source for product development and research, but that would be impossible to achieve this goal in a closed ecosystem.
3. Finally, the data is already out there. This information exists, but it's scattered across the internet. If we charged for access, someone else would eventually build a better, open source version.

We want to focus our effort on building. If we charged for this product, we would inevitably spend our time playing a game of cat-and-mouse to prevent unauthorized use.

This is a community-driven effort and we need your help to make it the best resource possible. There are two ways for you to help.

If you don't have the time to contribute to the dataset or build an integration, there are still other ways to help. We encourage you to link to us from your website, share our project with your colleagues, and promote us on social media.

Have something else in mind? Feel free to reach out and let us know!