Tag Archives: file formats

Extracting Open Data from PDFs in usable formats

Liveblog, ODCamp7, , , ,

A session on rescuing usable data supplied in PDFs, led by Martin.

A client of one of the session participants needed an automated process to check which PDFs had changed data in them – and which didn’t. They had been doing it manually. However, a computational solution isn’t as easy as it looks. For example, software often finds it hard to spot a table. It’s relatively easy to extract data from a table in a PDF, if it looks clearly like a table – borders around “cells”. However, many tables in PDFs are clear to humans – but not to computers. Extracting those sorts of tables is much more tricky.

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How to map everything – and how to share it

Liveblog, ODCamp3, , , , ,

WARNING – liveblogging. Prone to error, inaccuracy and howling affronts to grammar and syntax. Posts will be improved over the next 48 hours

Map Everything_1

Google Docs notes for this session

(Alistair Rae introduced the ideas for this session in a blog post: How to map everything (but you definitely shouldn’t)

The age of open data has created an George Mallory approach to geo data: why did you create it? Because it’s there. Alistair has created loads of maps just because he could. But “why?” needs to be asked more.

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