Maybe you are interested in running some frequency analysis, or creating a full-text search database for the Recovery.gov data? If so, you'll need to download the raw XML database from the Recovery.gov site, and write some code to parse it. I've created a stub project that uses Apache Commons Digester to create an Apache Lucene index.

The following steps describe the logic used to create a simple Lucene index from the Recovery.gov data. This sample project is available on GitHub here: http://github.com/tobrien/sample-parse

1. Download the Raw XML Data from Recovery.gov

2. Add the following dependencies to a Java application:

<dependency>
    	<groupId>commons-digester</groupId>
    	<artifactId>commons-digester</artifactId>
    	<version>2.0</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
    	<groupId>org.apache.lucene</groupId>
    	<artifactId>lucene-core</artifactId>
    	<version>2.9.0</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
    	<groupId>commons-collections</groupId>
    	<artifactId>commons-collections</artifactId>
    	<version>3.2.1</version>
    </dependency>

3. Place the "grants.xml" from Recovery.gov into a directory named "data/".

4. Write the following class to parse the Recovery.gov grants.xml file and populate a Lucene index with some basic field:

package com.discursive.sample.parse;

import java.io.File;

import org.apache.log4j.BasicConfigurator;
import org.apache.log4j.Level;
import org.apache.log4j.Logger;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.SimpleAnalyzer;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriter;
import org.apache.lucene.store.Directory;
import org.apache.lucene.store.SimpleFSDirectory;

public class ParsingGrants {

	private Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(ParsingGrants.class);

	public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
		BasicConfigurator.configure();
		Logger.getRootLogger().setLevel(Level.INFO);
		new ParsingGrants().go();
	}

	public void go() throws Exception {
		logger.info("Creating Index");
		Directory index = new SimpleFSDirectory(new File("index"));
		IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(index, new SimpleAnalyzer(), true,
				IndexWriter.MaxFieldLength.UNLIMITED);
		GrantIndexer grantIndexer = new GrantIndexer(writer);
		grantIndexer.init();
		grantIndexer.index(new File("./data/grants.xml"));
		writer.optimize();
		writer.close();
		logger.info("Parsing Complete, Index Created");
	}

}

5. This main class references a GrantIndexer which takes is responsible for adding documents to a Lucene index:

package com.discursive.sample.parse;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.URL;

import org.apache.commons.digester.Digester;
import org.apache.commons.digester.xmlrules.DigesterLoader;
import org.apache.log4j.Logger;
import org.apache.lucene.document.Document;
import org.apache.lucene.document.Field;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriter;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

public class GrantIndexer {

	private Logger logger = Logger.getLogger( GrantIndexer.class );
	
	private IndexWriter indexWriter;
    private Digester digester;
    private DigestContext context;
    public GrantIndexer(IndexWriter pIndexWriter) {
        indexWriter = pIndexWriter;
    }
    
    public void init( ) {
        URL grantRules = 
            GrantIndexer.class.getResource("grant-digester-rules.xml");
        digester = DigesterLoader.createDigester( grantRules );
    }
        
    public void index(File grantsXml) throws IOException, SAXException {
        context = new DigestContext( );
        digester.push( context );
        digester.parse( grantsXml );
    }
    
    public void processEntry( ) {
        Document doc = new Document( );
        doc.add(new Field("id", context.grantId, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));
        doc.add(new Field("zip", context.zip, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));
        doc.add(new Field("funding", context.funding, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));
        doc.add(new Field("city", context.city, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));
        doc.add(new Field("state", context.state, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));
        doc.add(new Field("title", context.title, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.ANALYZED));
        doc.add(new Field("desc", context.desc, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.ANALYZED));
        
        try {
            indexWriter.addDocument( doc );
        } catch( IOException ioe ) {
            logger.error( "Unable to add document to index", ioe);
        }
    }
    
    public class DigestContext {
        String grantId, zip, funding, state, city, title, desc;
        public void setGrantId(String grantId) { this.grantId = grantId; }
        public void setZip(String zip) { this.zip = zip; }
        public void setFunding(String funding) { this.funding = funding; }
        public void setCity(String city) { this.city = city; }
        public void setState(String state) { this.state = state; }
        public void setTitle(String title) { this.title = title; }
        public void setDesc(String desc) { this.desc = desc; }
		public void grantEnd( ) {
            processEntry( );
        }
    }
}

6. Lastly, these are the simple digester rules which populate the DigestContext bean defined in GrantIndexer:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<digester-rules>
    <pattern value="feed">
    <pattern value="entry">
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="id"
                                   propertyname="grantId"/>
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="content/recipient_zip"
                                   propertyname="zip"/>
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="content/recipient_city_name"
                                   propertyname="city"/>
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="content/recipient_state_code"
                                   propertyname="state"/>
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="content/fed_funding_amount"
                                   propertyname="funding"/>
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="content/cfda_program_title"
                                   propertyname="title"/>
        <bean-property-setter-rule pattern="content/proj_desc"
                                   propertyname="desc"/>
        <call-method-rule methodname="grantEnd"	
                                   paramtype="java.lang.Object"/>
    </pattern>
    </pattern>
</digester-rules>

7. Running this ParsingGrants should take approximately 20-30 seconds, after which you will have a Lucene index in a directory named "index/"