[okfn-labs] making open data consumable

[Rufus Pollock]

On 15 April 2014 14:32, nilanjan bhattacharya <nilanjanb at live.com> wrote:

>
> I don't follow this group closely, however I am interested in the idea of
> open data.
>

Great to hear from you.


> I think open data should move beyond excel/pdf/spreadsheets.  I think
> technology (visualization/analytics) has progressed a lot in the last few
> years.  To take advantage of the technology, the data should be represented
> in a digitally consumable form.  I think you can convert excel/pdf to json
> with little effort (some effort is required).  The returns on that are many
> fold.
>
> I wrote a blog post on how I converted the Singapore 2014 budget to JSON
> files - http://revelutions.com/?p=461
>

This is fantastic :-)


> If you'd like to see how the data is used take a look at another blog post
> http://revelutions.com/?p=454  In this post I have created a
> visualization using the data.  Note this works better on a laptop/desktop,
> since I have tooltips which show the values.
>

I don't mean to move you around lists too much but I think you'd be very
interested in the OpenSpending project: http://openspending.org/ (and the
associated Where Does My Money Go <http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/>!)

If you like treemaps (which I think you do!) you'll really like it (for
example here's world bank privatizations
https://openspending.org/wb-privatizations).

Using OpenSpending it would be pretty fast to create something like
http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ for Singapore ...

In particular, the main mailing list is here:

http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending

and the more geeky list is here
https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending-dev

(I note I'm also one of those finance data geeks so I also hang out there!)


> (The key concept in converting to JSON is preserving the heirarchy in the
> data.  See this sample : http://revelutions.com/budgets/moh.json - I
> think people on the okfn labs don't need to be told this).
>

:-)

rufus
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