Geocoding might be a corner case in terms of the usefulness of open data. The most valuable data is usually owned by huge corporations with lots of users (ie Amazon, Yelp, Visa, Google). Data usually is valuable because it's compiled from the usage of many people. So the only way to really build an API from that is to scrape them.
It's one thing that the uk seems to do pretty well at https://data.gov.uk lots of data available. Not all in uniform format but it is at least available
Eurostat (the EUs statistics institiution) also has a lot of statistics freely available http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/statistics-a-z/abc with permissive license, data download in CSV and XML as well as a REST service. Their online data viewer isn't pretty, but one of the more powerful examples as well.
What are some good websites/apis built using government data? AFAIK, most countries have started publishing open datasets about things such as weather, transportation, politician backgrounds, even law!
But I've yet to see some useful websites/apis built on top of them. Most are related to politics, visualization and/or research (which is a laudable enough but doesn't make them worth checking regularly).
Or you could get many people and organizations to contribute data under an open license. That's exactly what OpenStreetMap is: http://www.openstreetmap.org
Check out OpenAddresses: we're trying to solve the address/location data aggregation problem so you don't have to. We do all the data scraping and collating for you so you can work on making a geocoder. https://openaddresses.io/
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 40.5 ms ] threadBut I've yet to see some useful websites/apis built on top of them. Most are related to politics, visualization and/or research (which is a laudable enough but doesn't make them worth checking regularly).