Working with #opendata

Tony Hirst@psychemedia

DATAU

SERS

EducatorsLearners

PlannersMarketers

PolicymakersResearchers

PressNGOs

“DEVELOPERS”

A tools and issues

based view

DATA

TOOLS

USERS

PROBLEMS

Access/obtain data

Make sense of data

Ask specific questions of data

Communicate in a data-centric way

Load dataClean data

Merge/enrich data

DATA

Issues

TOOLS

DATA

OtherTOOLS

Issues

TOOLS

A barrier to access (for the tool user) is

data format

JSON XMLCSVXLS

TSV

.dbHTML

PDF DOCTXT

GLUE LOGIC(Glue code)

=importHTML(URL, “table”, N)

HTML

QUERYABLE DATA

=importHTML(URL, “table”, N)

HTML

INTERACTIVEDASHBOARD

Google Charts

A barrier to access (for the tool user) is

data shape

nother

A barrier to access (for the tool user) is

data cleanliness

nother

Yet

Clear to read?

Questions of identity

The Open UniversityOpen University

OUOpen Uni

Open University, UK

NORMALISATION/RECONCILIATION

Reconciliation to a canonical name

and/or to a unique identifier

A stumbling block (for the data user) is data enrichment

A stumbling block (for the data user) is joining datasets

nother

A stumbling block (for the data user) is joining partially

matched data

huge

Rolling your own interactive data

exploration tools

Google Visualisation

API

googleVis (R)

R Shiny Apps

ui.R server.R

RCharts

Many chart tools do the work for

you if the data is in the right shape

DATA

TOOLS

USERS PROBLEMS

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