[open-civil-society] Cuts data

[Tim Davies]

Hey David

Great work on the report - and good leading by example with the data.

The Five Stars of Linked Data is a good cumulative framework for thinking
about different steps of publishing open data:

http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/06/04/the-5-stars-of-open-linked-data/

Often a fairly quick shortcut to allow you to publish both structured
spreadsheets, with data on multiple tabs in context, and to make that data
available for those who want it as CSV, is to share it through Google Docs,
as with the permissions set right, a carefully crafted URL can give a user
the choice of viewing it in spreadsheet format online, downloading each
sheet as a CSV, or even querying the data directly over the web.

>From looking at your data, that's not so important as providing links back
to the original raw data sources you've used, which is what you're doing in
the spreadsheet. You might event want to think about including a list of all
the datasets you used just as a separate section on the page - so that your
'Data Appendix' shows the context you've used the data in, and links to 'raw
data sources' helps people head off to explore that data in context.

It will be interesting to see if any coverage/use of the report picks up on
the data appendix - and who the users are - as I suspect it won't just be
data-geeks who are interested in the content (lots of people after the raw
numbers and facts, as well as ways of mashing-up and visualising the
data...)

All the best

Tim



On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 6:14 PM, David Kane <David.Kane at ncvo-vol.org.uk>wrote:

> **
> Hi - you'll probably have seen the cuts research we released today.
>
> At the risk of being a self-publicist we've also released a "data
> appendix" spreadsheet that contains all the source data we used in creating
> the report. You can find a link to the spreadsheet here:
> http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/cuts-report#dataappendix
>
> I guess a wider point is that I often find we're releasing this kind of
> analysed data regularly, and apart from just putting up excel spreadsheets
> (though probably should be using open spreadsheet files!) I'm never sure of
> the best way of making them "open".
>
> I think it's different to "raw" data, like the charity commission register
> for example, because a CSV file can't show you the sructure of the data
> correctly, with lots of small linked tables. So I'm never sure if there's a
> better alternative to producing a big excel file.
>
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@timdavies

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