Are you in the media sector, local government or a software hackers/developers. Here’s an event that caught our eye called Hackers and Hacker’s Hack day at Old broadcasting house on the 28th October. We asked Scraper Wiki’s CEO Aine McGuire to tell us a little bit more about it.
Background
There’s lots of useful data on the internet – crime statistics, government spending, missing kittens…
But getting at it isn’t always easy. There’s a table here, a report there, web pages, PDFs, spreadsheets… And it can be scattered over thousands of different places on the web, making it hard to see the whole picture and the story behind it. It’s like trying to build something from Lego when someone has hidden the bricks all over town and you have to find them before you can start building! To get at data, programmers write bits of code called ‘screen scrapers’, which extract the useful bits so they can be reused in other apps, or rummaged through by journalists and researchers. But these bits of code tend to break, get thrown away or forgotten once they have been used, and so the data is lost again. Which is bad!
ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor, and the code and data are shared with the world. Because it’s a wiki, other programmers can contribute to and improve the code.
Who is ScraperWiki for?
ScraperWiki is useful both for programmers who want to write screen scrapers (the code used to generate data) with less fuss, and for journalists, activists and the general public who want to discover and re-use interesting, useful data.
With the ScraperWiki data tool and screen scraper, you can:
· Search and browse all the datasets in ScraperWiki
· Export data directly to a spreadsheet
· Suggest new datasets to the community or request directly from ScraperWiki
· View data by location
What is a Hacks and Hacker’s Day like?
At the beginning of the day we have a presentation about what a Hacks and Hackers Hack Day is all about. Then we give a short talk on ScraperWiki although we don’t prescribe that people use it. We let the journalists and developers gravitate together to form teams over datasets of interests. Then they go off and hack all day. At six o’clock we ask the project groups to come back and present for three minutes each their particular visualisation of the data set that they have worked on. Prizes are then awarded and there is a reception for the participants to attend.
How do you sign up click here http://hackdayleeds.eventbrite.com/
If you’re interested sponsoring our event speak to Aine McGuire (aine (at) scraperwiki.com)
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