As part of our work on USA.gov's social media registry, we created an API that simply serves up the 166 tags/topics that make up USA.gov's taxonomy of government information. They've developed this taxonomy over their 12 years researching everything government agencies publish online.
We use the API to nudge people who register social media accounts to use some standard terminology. When someone registers a social media account, we ask them to add some tags. They can add whatever they want, but we autocomplete any terms that are included on this list. E.g. http://registry.usa.gov/accounts?service_id=twitter&tag=science
As part of our work on USA.gov's social media registry, we created an API that simply serves up the 166 tags/topics that make up USA.gov's taxonomy of government information. They've developed this taxonomy over their 12 years researching everything government agencies publish online.
We use the API to nudge people who register social media accounts to use some standard terminology. When someone registers a social media account, we ask them to add some tags. They can add whatever they want, but we autocomplete any terms that are included on this list. E.g. http://registry.usa.gov/accounts?service_id=twitter&tag=science
If this would be useful to unitedstates, feel free to grab it from http://registry.usa.gov/tags.json or https://gist.github.com/jedsundwall/6300039