elsewhere – OUseful.Info, the blog…

Recently Elsewhere: Over On the School of Data Blog

A quick round-up of some recent-ish posts that I’ve popped up on the School Of Data blog…

Hunting for Data – Learning How to Read and Write Web Addresses, aka URLs – understanding a little bit about how the web is wired in terms of the web addresses (aka web locations, URLs etc etc) it uses can help you improve the power of your web searches, and also provides a gentle way in to the sort of thinking behind how databases are structured, and how we can query them.
Asking Questions of Data – Some Simple One-Liners – a simple intro to querying a database, in this case, a Google Spreadsheet…
When A Government Minister’s Data Laundry is Hung Out to Dry… – government ministers really shouldn’t try to pass dodgy stats…
Asking Questions of Data – Garment Factories Data Expedition – a quick intro to interrogating a simple database with a structured query language.
Analysing UK Lobbying Data Using OpenRefine – I’ve done a couple of tutorials on OpenRefine on this blog recently, but here’s another, that shows how we can use OpenRefine to start to wrangle with text descriptions and turn them into meaningful and well structured data elements.
Several Takes on Defining Data Journalism – this is an opening pitch, and something that needs iterating several times, I suspect, to fully shake it down. Comments appreciated…
Get Started With Scraping – Extracting Simple Tables from PDF Documents – how to use Python to scrape data from simple table over several pages of a relatively uncluttered PDF document. Even if the thought of hacking code to write your own scrapers leaves you cold, the post may give you a little insight into the sorts of puzzles that are involved in getting data out of document formats they have no right to be in.

As to what’s coming up next…? I’m not sure… I feel a bit worded out at the moment!

PS For other recent writings elsewhere, see also: Recent Robotics Reviews on OpenLearn…

By Me, on the Scraperwiki Blog: Glue Logic and Flowable Data

Regular readers will know I quite often make use of Scraperwiki for grabbing datasets and hosting views over scraped scraped data. A few days ago, I contributed a guest post to the Scraperwiki blog:

As well as being a great tool for scraping and aggregating content from third party sites, Scraperwiki can be used as a transformational “glue logic” tool: joining together applications that utilise otherwise incompatible data formats. Typically, we might think of using a scraper to pull data into one or more Scraperwiki database tables and then a view to develop an application style view over the data. Alternatively, we might just download the data so that we can analyse it elsewhere. There is another way of using Scraperwiki, though, and that is to give life to data as flowable web data.

Read the whole thing here: Glue Logic and Flowable Data.

PS I hope to write more about “flowable data”, feeds, and feed enrichment in a later post here on OUseful.info.

Blogged Elsewhere: Getting Started with COINS Gov Spending Linked Data

By me, but published over on the WhereDoesMyMoneyGo blog: In at the deep end: how to get started with COINS Linked Data

[My first stumbling attempts at exploring the structure of, and trying to write queries into, the COINS Linked Data store. In this first post, I didn’t actually manage to find any of the money…]