[okfn-labs] making open data consumable
nilanjan bhattacharya
nilanjanb at live.com
Wed May 14 00:46:55 UTC 2014
Hi Rufus,
Thanks for the appreciation.
Looking back, I wasn't sure what I was expecting from okfn. My ulterior motive was - I was hoping to get some data that I could use for visualization; maybe I was hoping that okfn could provide json type data sets....not sure....
In the meantime I decided to create a project on fiverr.com to convert the pdf data to the format I wanted. I wrote a blog post about it - 9 graphs for 5 dollars What this means (for me) is that I can convert the (any?) data that I want for a small fee to json.
I still think it would be nice if OKFN could provide data in json format (I am hoping someone can wave a magic wand :-) )
Regards,
- Nilanjan
------------------
Revelutions
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 20:26:00 +0100
Subject: Re: [okfn-labs] making open data consumable
From: rufus.pollock at okfn.org
To: nilanjanb at live.com
CC: okfn-labs at lists.okfn.org
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!)
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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