Category: data

data, Development, Work3 Comments

Mapping postcodes with ScraperWiki and the Google Maps API

Andrew Beeken

After my last, film and videogame related post, we’re back to familiar ground to look at the ace mashup/data processing tool ScraperWiki. ScraperWiki is a great little suite of programming languages with a very specific focus on extracting information from webpages, files, you name it. It has a database that you can use to store your data and generates URI’s that you can point people to to retrieve your data. One of the really cool things you can do is to take the data you’ve “scraped” and do “things” with it through the views functionality. There is a choice of … Continue reading Mapping postcodes with ScraperWiki and the Google Maps API

data, Video3 Comments

Mapped videos with YouTube, Google Docs and Fusion Tables

Andrew Beeken

Yesterday I attended the Hyperlocal West Midlands Govcamp in Wallsall (Addictomatic linky here). One of the sessions I attended/chipped in on was the “Blue Peter Open Data” session hosted by Will Perrin. There was some very interesting laymans term open-data stuff coming out of it; not much I didn’t already know, but I do like sessions of that kind! Part way through, Will showed how he’d used Google’s Fusion tables to analyse data sets created or hosted in Google Docs. A pretty cool tool in itself, it also comes with the ability to analyse and map GeoData. This is great … Continue reading Mapped videos with YouTube, Google Docs and Fusion Tables

data, Projects2 Comments

Extract KML data from Google My Maps

Andrew Beeken

So this is something that’s been bugging me for a while now. At the City of Lincoln Council I promote not only the use of web based tools such as those that Google supply, but also the use of open data. To that, I created the site data.lincoln.gov.uk, a WordPress powered site which pushes out Lincoln data sets in a nice, easey, machine readable way. CSV, RDF – those boxes got ticked early on. But KML was eluding me. We create most of our maps by hand in Google maps. Now, I know that this produces KML – it can … Continue reading Extract KML data from Google My Maps

data, Projects2 Comments

Implementing custom HTML in WordPress

Andrew Beeken

As you will know from the last post, I’m working on getting Lincoln’s election data into the Open Election Data project. RDFa-ifying the content on our website was fairly straightforward involving me having to add funky attributes to the HTML pages. The next step, however, was a bit tougher as links to the pages had to be discoverable. Again, this involved adding some custom RDFa attributes to the HTML – this was not possible in our admin system without some severe jiggery-pokery, so I turned to the recently launched data.lincoln.gov.uk. What should have been straightforward, however, still proved problematic. I … Continue reading Implementing custom HTML in WordPress

data, Projects1 Comment

Open Data – Lincoln Style

Andrew Beeken

With the recent rush of activity regarding open data on the web and the launch of data.gov.uk it seemed only fitting that I try and follow suit with the data that Lincoln holds. Experimenting with Google Docs has shown that it’s pretty straightforward to get data up in csv format, visualise it and provide it in a number of flavours for consumption. So what’s next? As data.gov.uk has given central gov an ever expanding repository for open data files, I thought that it would be best for Lincoln to follow suit as well. That brings me to data.lincoln.gov.uk. Currently in … Continue reading Open Data – Lincoln Style