The following post is by Aidan McGuire, co-founder of ScraperWiki. It is cross-posted on the ScraperWiki blog.
ScraperWiki are looking for open data activists to try out our new “Open your data” tool.
Since its first launch ScraperWiki has worked closely with the Open Data community. Today we’re building on this commitment by pre-announcing the release of the first in a series of tools that will enable open data activists to publish data directly to open data catalogues.
To make this even easier, ScraperWiki will also be providing free datahub accounts for open data projects.
This first tool will allow users of CKAN catalogues (there are 50, from Africa to Washington) to publish a dataset that has been ingested and cleaned on the new ScraperWiki platform. It’ll be released on the 11th July.
If you run an open data project which scrapes, curates and republishes open data, we’d love your help testing it. To register, please email hello@scraperwiki.com with “open data” in the subject, telling us about your project.
Why are we doing this? Since its launch ScraperWiki has provided a place where an open data activist could get, clean, analyse and publish data. With the retirement of “ScraperWiki Classic” we decided to focus on the getting, cleaning and analysing, and leave the publishing to the specialists – places like CKAN.
This new “Open your data” tool is just the start. Over the next few months we also hope that open data activists will help us work on the release of tools that:
- Generate RDF (linked data)
- Update data real time
- Publish to other data catalogues
Here’s to liberating the world’s messy open data!
Aidan McGuire is the co-founder of ScraperWiki, the site which enables you to “Get, clean, analyse, visualise and manage your data,
with simple tools or custom-written code.” Among other things, they write and catalogue screen-scrapers to extract and analyse public data from websites.
This post is by a guest poster. If you would like to write something for the Open Knowledge Foundation blog, please see the submissions page.
This tool is now available as standard to all users of the new ScraperWiki. Simply choose “More tools” on any dataset, then “Open your data”.