[okfn-discuss] Opportunity for open format access to some env data

[Rufus Pollock]

2009/4/3 Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net>:
>
> Hi all,
>
> The UK Govt has released the new sustainable development indicators.
> There's a lot of very useful and important data here, and the best they can
> do is a set of clunky web pages and some Excel spreadsheets.
>
> http://www.defra.gov.uk/sustainable/government/progress/regional/index.htm

Though raw data is always good!

> This would be great if offered in a more machine-readable way, with
> historical data included. How much work would it be to make it available

That would be great. By machine readable I assume you mean something
like csv or sql (anything that isn't human readable only excel
spreadsheets!). Where would historical data come from?

> properly, and what do people think about asking for that?

Asking the gov to do this "properly" is probably not that productive
though asking for more data probably is ...

It might not be that hard to this ourselves. For example we did this
for the Millenium Development Goals:

<http://www.openeconomics.net/mdg/>

And we've been doing quite a bit of parsing and presenting of similar
UK Govt Excel spreadsheets for "Where Does My Money Go" (see [1] for
parsing code):

<http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/>
<http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/table/2>

It probably would not be hard to knock up something like this for
these sustainability indicators.

Rufus

[1]: <http://knowledgeforge.net/econ/hg/file/a639efe4e1d6/econdata/ukgovfinances/>
<http://knowledgeforge.net/econ/hg/file/a639efe4e1d6/econdata/ukgovfinances/data.py>