Currently the root (http://data.cityofchicago.org) is hard coded and seems to be the only thing specific to the Chicago Data portal:
class Base
def self.root
"http://data.cityofchicago.org"
end
but if that could be modified at runtime then you could use this gem to interface with other socrata sites:
http://explore.data.gov
http://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov
...etc
A suggestion would be to make the root url could have an attr_accessor like the app_token does.