Tag Archives: tools

Data Visualisation: making it work

Liveblog, ODCamp7, , ,

An Open Data Camp 7 session on data visualisation, led by Ian Makgill. These are live-blogged notes.

Drawnalism: data visualisation

There is a lot of temptation to use really exciting visualisations. But 90% of the time, you end up with bar or line charts – because they work. If you have more than 20 data points along the x axis, you probably want a line chart, not a bar chart.

 

 

 

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Extracting Open Data from PDFs in usable formats

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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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Maps, Maps, Maps: good maps, bad maps and accessible maps

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What do you do if you find QGIS too easy (and like pain) – you start mapping in R.

But what do people in the room do with mapping, and what data sets do they use?

In Birmingham they used Edubase to plot previous ‘catchment’ areas for schools. Some schools do it from the centre of schools, some from the school gates. And some schools have more than one gate… Some were basing it on distance to the nearest train station. It was about creating boundaries, and then you could set up a tool based on postcodes to see if people are within the boundaries are not.

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Handy tools for Open Data users

Liveblog, ODcamp 2015, , , , , ,

Warning: Liveblogging – prone to error, inaccuracy, and howling affronts to grammar. This post will be improved over the course of a few days.

 

A session sharing handy open data tools that participants have built or found that might just make your life easier.

Google document for this session

Chris Gutteridge, University of Southampton

  • Prefix.cc – look up namespaces for RDF
  • Graphite PHP Linked Data Library – most of the RDF tools are written by academics who are clever, and assume that others are clever. Chris just wanted to build something easy – and that’s what Graphite is. It’s an easy way of exploring linked data. It makes it easy to debug the RDF code you create. The development version has a SPARQL interface, making it easy to build SPARQL queries.
  • Alicorn – a tool for generating pages from linked data.
  • RDF Browser – a quick and dirty RDF browser
  • Triple Checker – a tool to check for common errors in RDF Triples.
  • NTCat
  • Hedgehog – an RDF publishing platform

All of the source code for these is available on GitHub.

James Smith, ODI

The ODI tends to focus on simpler tools – and formats like CSV. Some much data out there is in poor condition.

  • CSVlint – a validator for data in CSV format, which also works with schemas. In alpha currently, and aiming for beta this year.
  • Open Data Certificates – a project to help people make assurances around their data, that gives others the confidence to build from it.
  • Git Data Publisher – a tool to help you publish your open data, guiding you through what you need to do.

Others

  • Gangplank – an open source data publishing platform