[OpenSpending] Swiss Open Savings App: Visualization of Canton of Bern ASP 2014

Sun Jul 7 20:18:12 UTC 2013

[sorry for cross-posting]

Hi all

I'd like to forward you a message from Oleg Lavrovsky who wrote a notice 
in English about our newest Swiss open finance app (mentioned also in 
yesterday's news on 
http://www.derbund.ch/bern/stadt/Diese-Seifenblasen-sind-ein-Sparpaket/story/20673734)

***

Last week the government of the Canton of Berne presented a proposed 
budgetary reform for 2014 aiming at savings of up to 490 million francs 
a year. Working out the right strategy is a big, ongoing project, a 
challenge of financial analysis and political collaboration - we want to 
do our part to help ourselves and common citizens like us make sense of 
the complexity involved. To this end, Thomas Preusse, Matthias Stürmer 
and I have extracted and transformed this data and visualized it here: 
http://be-asp.budget.opendata.ch

In our app, the capital and resource savings are represented per year 
and for each Directorate. Both the savings pot 1 (recommended by 
government measures) as well as in pot 2 (not recommended by the 
government measures) are presented. All measures are also listed in a 
table. When you click on the circles and table entries, detailed 
information from the report is shown.

The planned savings were extracted from the 142-page Report of the 
Governing Council - Supply and structure inspection (ASP 2014). This PDF 
contained a rather uniform structure, with a table overview that was 
used to create the main visualization, and detailed line items which we 
extracted from the following pages.

@tpreusse undoubtedly deserves most of the credit for this effort - 
managing to design and develop a brand new frontend layout suitable for 
this new app over the weekend, work nights to roll in feedback and 
corrections. His mastery of the data visualization framework D3.js is 
evident, the custom force-directed graph component something he has been 
working on for the past year - and he assures me that his goal is also 
to release a more general-purpose version for the open source community.

I was tasked with mining the data, creating a Python script that uses 
pdfminer to parse the PDF, and a bucket of regular expressions to make 
sense of it. Note that while all of the items get parsed, corrections 
need to be made to the data such as cleaning up hyphens and adding a few 
missing statistics. This script is also compatible with ScraperWiki.

Many thanks to @maemst for getting the data to us fresh off the web, 
hustling and helping to realise this project. Now what are you waiting 
for, go help our canton save its budget!

-- 
Opendata.ch - Enabling Open Government Data in Switzerland
Dr. Matthias Stürmer // Founding Board Member // Politics
+41 76 368 81 65 // matthias.stuermer at opendata.ch