[wdmmg-dev] Making sense of the OpenSpending UK Govt 25k data dump

Tue Sep 20 09:16:16 UTC 2011

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 10:00, Chris Taggart <countculture at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's in the CSV downloaded from http://ckan.net/dataset/ukgov-25k-spending

Right, I see. I honestly don't have any clue about this dataset, but
looking at the model file, I find that the unique_ids for this dataset
are computed from the "unique_id" column. I have no idea what the
resource_id column is, and the model indicates that it serves no
special purpose when loaded into OpenSpending.

> (The download link from OpenSpending didn't work, by the way,

What doesn't work?

    curl http://openspending.org/dataset/ukgov-25k-spending/entries.csv

works fine for me. Until we close ticket #213 [1] you can get the
whole dataset by downloading a page at a time by appending ?page=N to
the URL above.

[1]: https://github.com/okfn/openspending/issues/213

> neither did the JS OpenSpending model on the CKAN page -- just comes up with empty modal
> window

Do you mean the "Preview" button? No, that doesn't work for me either,
but if just click on "OpenSpending Model" you get taken to the model
just fine. We can't field bugs for CKAN here, I'm afraid.

Lastly, if you really want to compute the ids yourself from the CSV
file you've downloaded from CKAN, then the unique id for each row is:

    sha1(sha1('ukgov-25k-spending') + sha1(str(unique_id)))

Hope that clears things up.

Best,
Nick