The Office for National Statistics releases over 600 national statistics every year. They came to ScraperWiki to help improve their backend processing, so they could build a more usable web interface for people to download data. We created an on-premises environment where their numerate staff learnt a minimal amount of coding, and now create short […]
Running a code club at DCLG
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has to track activity across more than 500 local authorities and countless other agencies. They needed a better way to handle this diversity and complexity of data, so decided to use ScraperWiki to run a club to train staff to code. Martin Waudby, data specialist, said: I […]
Highlights of 3 years of making an AI newsreader
We’ve spent three years working on a research and commercialisation project making natural language processing software to reconstruct chains of events from news stories, representing them as linked data. If you haven’t heard of Newsreader before, our one year in blog post is a good place to start. We recently had our final meeting in […]
6 lessons from sharing humanitarian data
This post is a write-up of the talk I gave at Strata London in May 2015 called “Sharing humanitarian data at the United Nations“. You can find the slides on that page. The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an unusual data hub. It’s made by the UN, and is successfully used by agencies, NGOs, companies, […]
GOV.UK – Contracts Finder… £1billion worth of carrots!
This post is about the government Contracts Finder website. This site has been created with a view to helping SMEs win government business by providing a “one-stop-shop” for public sector contracts. Government has been doing some great work transitioning their departments to GOV.UK and giving a range of online services a makeover. We’ve been involved […]
Henry Morris (CEO and social mobility start-up whizz) on getting contacts from PDF into his iPhone
Meet @henry__morris! He’s the inspirational serial entrepreneur that set up PiC and upReach. They’re amazing businesses that focus on social mobility. We interviewed him for PDFTables.com He’s been using it to convert delegate lists that come as PDF into Excel and then into his Apple iphone. It’s his preferred personal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it’s […]
Civil Service People Survey – Faster, Better, Cheaper
The Civil Service is one of the UK’s largest employers. Every year it asks every civil servant what it thinks of its employer: UK plc. For Sir Jeremy Heywood the survey matters. In his blog post “Why is the People Survey Important?” he says “The survey is one of the few ways we can objectively […]
Horizon 2020–Project TIMON
ScraperWiki are members of a new EU Horizon 2020 project: TIMON “Enhanced real time services for optimized multimodal mobility relying on cooperative networks and open data”. This is a 3.5 year project, that commenced in June 2015, whose objectives are: to improve road safety; to provide greater transport flexibility in terms of journey planning across multiple modes […]
Number of prescriptions by location
There are 211 clinical commissioning groups (CCG’s) across England dispensing a range of medications every day. These CCG’s have demographic factors that could affect how much medication is dispensed. Therefore I thought it would interesting to compare the number of items dispensed in CCGs across England for a number of different medications, using the Clinical […]
Branded and Generic medication compared
According to the Office of Health Economics for the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), the total medicines bill in the UK was £13.6 billion in 2011 and £10.8 billion of this was spent on branded medication. Prescribers such as GPs are encouraged to prescribe generic medicine instead of its branded version. This is […]