A site about social media for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful.

Archive for the ‘Data’ Category

SpeedData: Matthew Somerville

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We’ve already heard from Matthew Somerville of MySociety, who has introduced us to some of the websites that he has been involved in. These include: Mapumental, which is a site where house prices and travel information feed into an interactive map. A map rating places on how scenic they are He also metioned a site [...]

So how generous is Ordnance Survey OpenData?

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At the beginning of this month (apologies, we’re a bit late) the Government announced that much of the mapping data held by the Ordnance Survey would be released free to the public.

Local data and the Data.gov.uk site

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In January the data.gov.uk site was launched at an event at the Guardian’s headquarters in London. For the unitiated, this site is the government’s attemp, under the guidance of World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to take data that is in the hands of the government and make it available [...]

The gritty truth about data and mapping

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How maps and open data can be used to help people learn more about gritting routes in their area

Mapping road death data

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The BBC recently undertook a web project to make road death accidents “relevant to people” during a week’s coverage. Deaths were plotted on a map and searchable by postcode with links to the relevant news article. You can see and interact with the map on the BBC website here. The way the data is presented [...]

Copy and paste hyperlocal blogging

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As the hyperlocal phenomenon spreads across the UK, those who have been doing it for a while now are coming up with easy models for hyperlocal bloggers to adapt for their own website. Philip John has been a very busy bee, working on a number of plug-ins (which you upload to your site as a [...]

Making climate change visible

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Following the confused and convoluted arguments surrounding the climate change summit in Copenhagen last week, a number of journalists have tried to find a way of coherently presenting the arguments for and against scepticism about climate change. David Candless writes on the Guardian Datablog there is little online to explain the arguments to people who [...]

Hackitude gets down and dirty with data

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Over the weekend a small tremour was felt across Birmingham. The distinct rumble was caused by a group of web developers, data hackers and HTML magicians who had gathered to do something wonderful – and the result was explosive. Held at the Aquila TV studios, Birmingham, Hackitude took place from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 [...]

Rounding up a team of local data enthusiasts

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Will Perrin from Talk About Local in a recent blogpost has said he’d like to get together a number of people who are interested in opening up local government data for creative use. This group will meet-up with a government team looking into stimulating application of local government data sets. He invites those who want [...]

Periodic table of data visualisation methods

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Stuck for a way to visualise a set of data? This periodic table of methods is sure to throw something up which you might be able to apply to your data set. Move your cursor over an element to see the visualisation. Error: Embedded data could not be displayed.