[open-government] Software for Open Data : Drupal?

Mon Sep 12 15:24:40 UTC 2011

On 12 September 2011 11:38, Neil McEvoy <neil at mcevoy.biz> wrote:
>
> Thanks Rufus, this seems to be exactly what's needed.
>
> My goal is to host it locally in Canada, so that it's entirely tailored
> for the government's needs here. I presume it's quite straight forward to
> install and operate?

Yes, it's straightforward to deploy and is open source (obviously!).
In fact there was a deployment done (with integration with Drupal)
early last year for this site:

<http://www.datadotgc.ca/>

> Once installed, is it possible to simply start contacting Government
> agencies and offering them a facility to integrate and host their data in
> this environment?

Yes.

> I presume most of the heavy lifting would be in identifying, extracting
> and transforming the data...

Yes, that's the hardest part of it -- particularly because data is
very variable (geodata isn't the same as chemical data, data from
excel files may be handled differently from linked data or ESRI shape
files etc).

Rufus