Open Data – Bangalore | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

“The Bangalore data scene is huge. A bustling IT and data mining industry means that you are never far away from the nearest data miner or analyst, and at the Fifth Elephant Conference, the data crowd prowled for the best tips, biggest data and newest discoveries. The Fifth Elephant was our first port of call and Laura Newman and I were there to conduct workshops on the School of Data and OpenSpending… Laura gave a first taste of what was in store in theSchool of Data, which is due to launch this autumn. The workshop ‘challenge’ involved reverse engineering a Guardian article on the World’s Worst Carbon Emitters, which shows India scoring pretty badly if looked at as a country, but pretty well if looked at on a per capita basis. After some discussion of cleaning, manipulating and analysis techniques, participants were encouraged to find their own stories in data. A few surprises were in store; despite being quite a technical audience, many had little or no experience with spreadsheet programmes, and were very interested to learn what they could do with them... Next up, the OpenSpending workshop produced a flurry of great questions, “How much does OpenSpendingknow about your data? Does it have a concept of what is revenue and what is spending?”, “Can you compare real vs planned expenditure?”, “Are there any time-series visualisations?”, and also a flurry of volunteers, wanting to know how they could get involved. A discussion on how important it is to show your working, a tutorial on Google Refine for cleaning messy spending data appeared well-received and one nail-biting live demonstration on a flaky internet connection later, we had a high-level visualisation of the general shape of the Indian Expenditure Budget showing how much money in 2012 is planned to go on on debt servicing vs planned and non-plan expenditure… See the data we used and how we wrangled it for these visualisations on the Datahub...”