[GTALUG] Myles's Open Data Talk

Stewart Russell scruss at gmail.com
Tue Sep 12 20:48:42 EDT 2017


Great talk from Myles tonight. Canada is trying to be better about open
data, but it has a long way to go.

There are open PDF scraping tools, but they tend to be very limited in
domain. It's always fun when you get data that must be published, but
there's no stipulation that it's usable. The best example of this is the US
Armed Forces Appropriations data that's published in a single giant PDF
every year. While it genuinely does publish details of every military
contract, it uses a fiendish set of page templates to make it very
difficult to parse. I ended up making minor headway consider each page as
geodata, with each page a map with words at given coordinates.

Cheers
 Stewart
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