[OpenSpending] From XML

[Lucy Chambers]

Hi All,

Apologies for cross-posts. Thanks to Mark Brough and others, we've
just written up the work that has been going on behind the scenes to
piece together and visualise the IATI dataset and aligning aid with
budgets. The visualisation is now live in BETA on the OpenSpending
website here: http://openspending.org/iati.

There is a post outlining the history behind the IATI
dataset:http://openspending.org/blog/2012/06/05/IATI-on-OpenSpending.html
- it also outlines some next steps, there are always modifications
which can be made to improve the conversion scripts, geocode the data,
reconcile organisations etc. Please get in contact if you have any
questions or are keen to get involved.

Besides the post, we've started on a series of briefings to help
people contextualise and use the data so that people see the data
alongside accompanying documents and instructions on what they can do
with the data. Briefing #2 is on IATI data and covers what IATI is,
using the IATI registry, consolidating data into a simple format,
loading data into OpenSpending and using the OpenSpending API to
access the data.

We'd love to build on these briefings and see them for other core
datasets, so any suggestions or improvements are welcome. If you'd be
interested in writing a briefing for other datasets, please do get in
touch!  The Briefing can be found here:
http://openspending.org/resources/iati/index.html

Take care,

Lucy

-- 
Lucy Chambers
Community Coordinator,
OpenSpending & Data Journalism
Open Knowledge Foundation
Skype: lucyfediachambers
Twitter: @lucyfedia