Open data activists, start your engines. Following on from last week’s announcement about publishing open data from ScraperWiki, we’re now excited to unveil the first iteration of the “Open your data” tool, for publishing ScraperWiki datasets to any open data catalogue powered by the OKFN’s CKAN technology. Try it out on your own datasets. You’ll […]
Three hundred thousand tonnes of gold
On 2 July 2012, the US Government debt to the penny was quoted at $15,888,741,858,820.66. So I wrote this scraper to read the daily US government debt for every day back to 1996. Unfortunately such a large number overflows the double precision floating point notation in the database, and this same number gets expressed as […]
Growing back to the Future: Allotments in the UK, open data stories and interventions
This is a guest blog post from Farida Vis. She attended EuroHack at the Open Government Data Camp 2011. It consisted of a series of short talks combined with plenty of opportunities for hacking in groups in the second part the workshop. On the day, we were given an introduction to data driven journalism by data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Brill, who […]
Diggers and Dinosaurs – Scraping at the Mozilla Festival
In a complete paradigm shift of the epic battle between Godzilla and Mothra we are turning our backs on the old claymation medium and embracing the digital age where dinosaurs and diggers (yes, I am aware we are a machine and not a moth) can roam free across the lawless plains of web 2.0. Both […]
Announcing The Big Clean, Spring 2011
We’re very excited to announce that we’re helping to organise an international series of events to convert not-very-useful, unstructured, non-machine-readable sources of public information into nice clean structured data. This will make it much easier for people to reuse the data, whether this is mixing it with other data sources (e.g. different sources of information […]