Frictionless Data is an Open Knowledge International project which started over 10 years ago as a community-driven effort of Open Knowledge Labs. Over the last 3 years, with funding from partners like the Sloan Foundation and Google, the Frictionless Data team has worked tirelessly to remove ‘friction’ from working with data. A well-defined set of specifications have been published and used by organizations in the data space, our list of data packages has grown and our tools are evolving to cater to some of the issues that people encounter while working with data.
Owing to our growing community of users and the need to extend implementation of version 1.0 specifications to additional programming languages, we launched the Frictionless Data Tool Fund in March 2017. The one-time $5,000 grant per implementation language has so far attracted 70+ applications from our community of mostly exceptional developers from all over the world.
At this time, we have awarded four grants for the implementation of Frictionless Data libraries in R, Go, Java and PHP. We recently asked the grantees to tell us about themselves, their work with data and what they will be doing with their grants. These posts are part of the grantee profile series, written to shine a light on Frictionless Data’s Tool Fund grantees, their work and to let our technical community know how they can get involved.
“I would also love to have PHP developers use the core libraries to write some more high-level tools. With the availability of the PHP libraries for Frictionless Data the task of developing such plugins will be greatly simplified”
From juggling fire clubs and working with data at The Museum of The Jewish People, to how he envisions use of the Frictionless Data PHP libraries to develop high level tools, read Ori Hoch’s profile to find out what he will be working on and how you can be a part of it.
“I hope to use the Tool Fund grant I received to bring Go’s performance and concurrency capabilities to data processing and to have a set of tools distributed as standalone and multi-platform binaries”
Read Daniel Fireman’s profile and find out more about his work on social network platforms, how he’s used GO to improve data transparency in Brazil, the challenges he has encountered while working with data and how he intends to alleviate these things using his Go grant.
“ We are going to implement two Frictionless Data libraries in R – Table Schema for publishing and sharing tabular-style data and Data Package for describing a coherent collection of data in a single package, keeping the frictionless data specifications.”
Read Open Knowledge Greece’s profile and find out more about Open Knowledge festival that they will be hosting in Thessaloniki, Greece in 2018, plus, why they are excited to be implementing Frictionless data libraries in R and how you can contribute to their efforts.
“Data is messy and, for developers, cleaning and processing data from one project to another can quickly turn an awesome end-product idea into a burdensome chore. Data packages and Frictionless Data tools and libraries are important because they allow developers to focus more on the end-product itself without having to worry about heavy lifting in the data processing pipeline.”
From travel, to physics and astronautics, read Georges Labrèche’s profile and find out more about his interests and work at Open Data Kosovo as well as how you can follow and contribute to his work around Frictionless Data’s Java libraries.
Frictionless Data is a project of Open Knowledge International. Interested in knowing more? Read about the standards, data and tools, and find out how to get involved. All code developed in support of this project is hosted on the frictionlessdata organization on GitHub. Contributions are welcome.
Have a question or comment? Let us know on our Discuss forum or on our Gitter chat.
Developer Advocate, Open Knowledge Foundation
