[wdmmg-discuss] Detailed spending data for London

[Alistair Turnbull]

I have manually made a little spreadsheet of metadata here:

 	http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AijCXAu1IV6YdDFyYW1VTHJvYXlmQThHQURrQ3VXY1E&hl=en_GB&output=html

This is mainly to be able to map the filename to the reporting period. I 
also took the opportunity to note which months have date and invoice 
number filled in.

 	Alistair

On Wed, 19 May 2010, Alistair Turnbull wrote:

> On Wed, 19 May 2010, Donovan Hide wrote:
>
>> Rather than manually fix the dates, I think I'll try and get them to
>> fix the data and then rescrape it if they do. Questions of provenance
>> arise if you make arbitrary decisions on data that might be used to
>> form powerful conclusions!!! That's why I've preserverd the link and
>> rowNumber: to prove where the data came from. Additionally, the
>> guessed date might be wrong - it could be perfectly reasonable that an
>> invoice is from May 12th is paid on June 31st, but appears on the July
>> CSV. Which is the correct date?
>
> Good point. In that case the "reporting period" is an independent column.
>
> I agree with your policy of recording the source. I wish they had done the 
> same thing, i.e. that the invoice (document) number was present in every 
> record. Seems to be present for about half of them, seemingly in random 
> months!
>
> 	Alistair
>
>> On 19 May 2010 15:42, Alistair Turnbull <apt1002 at goose.minworks.co.uk> 
>> wrote:
>>> Great stuff, Donny.
>>> 
>>> A couple of observations:
>>> 
>>> 1. There are at least two different index pages for this data set:
>>> 
>>>        http://legacy.london.gov.uk/gla/expenditure/index.jsp
>>> 
>>>  http://www.london.gov.uk/who-runs-london/greater-london-authority/expenditure-over-1000
>>> 
>>> You've used the second one, which appears to have an extra four months'
>>> data. That's probably correct, but it might be worth establishing which 
>>> one
>>> is the index that's going to receive best long-term support.
>>> 
>>> 2. Especially for the months without a "Date" column, it would be useful 
>>> to
>>> record at least the month in which the spending happened. There seems to 
>>> be
>>> no good automatic way of doing this. Looks like a manual job. :-(
>>> 
>>>        Alistair
>>> 
>>> On Wed, 19 May 2010, Donovan Hide wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Cleaned version here:
>>>> 
>>>> http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/show/greater-london-assembly-expenditure/
>>>> 
>>>> Seems like the CSV's are prepared manually at the end of the month,
>>>> they are very inconsistent in their formatting!
>>>> 
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Donny,
>>>> 
>>>> On 19 May 2010 14:22, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> The Greater London Authority has just made detailed data on
>>>>> expenditure over £1000 available (via the Guardian Data Blog [1]):
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> <http://www.london.gov.uk/who-runs-london/greater-london-authority/expenditure-over-1000>
>>>>> 
>>>>> Have created a CKAN package:
>>>>> 
>>>>> <http://ckan.net/package/gla-spending>
>>>>> 
>>>>> And we'll may have a stab at loading this data into a new slice in the
>>>>> data store <http://data.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/>
>>>>> 
>>>>> Rufus
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> [1]:<http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/may/19/greater-london-authority-spending-analysis>
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>> 
>>>> 
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>