Loomio
Thu 15 May 2014 9:27PM

Open data, powerful laptops and the public

TM Tim McNamara Public Seen by 13

There are lots of interesting data sets, often provided by NZ's science orgs (see data.govt.nz). Could they be presented in a way that would enable mash ups and exploration?

PR

Pierre Roudier Thu 15 May 2014 9:34PM

For data exploration: NIWA has been modifying QGIS (the leading open-source GIS) to include its web services: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-services/software/quantum-map

SY

Stuart Yeates Thu 15 May 2014 10:12PM

What I think would be useful would be a site that (a) cached and archived the data (particularly the 'available on request' ones from https://data.govt.nz) (b) included data from slightly broader range of orgs and (c) did validation, summarisation and repackaging.

TL

Thomas Lumley Thu 15 May 2014 10:30PM

We have a PhD student working on automated tools for getting NZ official data into analysable form -- a lot of the nominally 'computer readable' stuff is Excel files with prettiness added.

Also, rOpenSci is worth a look http://ropensci.org/