Posted by brianbehlendorf on March 28, 2011 at 11:32pm
A note was posted to the Sunlight GoogleGroup list recently pointing to:
http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/
A free, self-contained, ready-to-run VM with apps+data for
- geocoding (using geocoder.us. I'm assuming TIGER and OS data)
- geodict "pulls country, city and region names from unstructured English text"
- political boundary lookup (various sources)
- lots of data processing tools, eg pdf ->text
- more
It doesn't look like a data warehouse, but it looks like a natural complement to one, and has that "easy to install and use" approach that makes it very interesting. Of course that's "easy for the data hacker". :)
Thoughts?
Brian
Comments
Certainly it could
It's a great service - I created a similar thing for OpenStreetMap map rendering a few years ago (http://tiledrawer.com) and still receive regular emails about it even though it's woefully out of date.
I've got a longer introductory message to this group brewing, but the general gist of it is that publishing formats are what I feel will make or break open data efforts, so to whatever degree a toolkit or application helps drive users toward pushing simple, usable files out the door is going to win. DataSF.org gets this mostly-right, but they made the decision to go with what the San Francisco GIS Dept was already publishing: shapefiles in CA State Plane III projection, singularly unhelpful for developers not already comfortable with advanced geographic data.
do you have that intro ready?
I would love to read your longer, introductory message.
--
i heart drupal
intro
I am a librarian, worked for 8 years as a corporate research librarian and was laid off/retired after that time. I have a MLIS from Kent State University, where I took some web and database design classes. Love the design process and have been picking up some free-lance work in that capacity. Drupal allows much more design freedom than other CMS's I have seen, but with that comes the need for greater familiarity with data formats and PHP. Many customers want dynamic maps in their sites, that is, maps that apply markers to multiple different locations depending on user location, address name, or other criteria. So far, I have been unable to make the openlayers module work in this way - don't know if that is because of my considerable ignorance, or because openlayers is still a work in progress. Hope to learn from this group.