New Zealand Herald hosts Open Data Day

The New Zealand Herald hosted the Open Data Day on Saturday, as part of the international event held in various countries.

The event was attended by programmers, academics, civil servants and journalists.

The aim of this event is to raise awareness for the open data movement and facilitate the sharing of knowledge across diverse skill sets, which helps build better infrastructure for public data sets.

Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike, according to the Open Data Handbook.

Here's a brief summary of the various topics that were discussed at the event:

Kim Ollivier shared the process of wrangling the census data from StatisticsNZ. This fuel map, showing the usage of coal in New Zealand, is part of the output.

The code behind Ollivier's process can be found here.

Chris McDowall, from DigitalNZ, gave a walkthrough of an open source tool called Supplejack, which can be used to harvest data from diverse sources on the web. The code for this tool can be found here and the documentation is available here.

Herald investigative journalists David Fisher and Matt Nippert answered questions on the use and abuse of the Official Information Act(OIA) which is a cornerstone of the Open Data movement in New Zealand. Here's an opinion piece by David Fisher on OIA.

As part of the talk, an open source website known as FYI.org.nz was also highlighted which allows anyone to make an OIA request. Every request and response is then logged on the website and can be accessed by anyone. FYI.org.nz is a voluntary effort by Rowan Crawford.

Hayden Glass gave a preview of the new version for the data-driven WikiNewZealand, which is about to relaunch soon.

Herald news developer Caleb Tutty, who organised the event, gave a talk on using MongoDB for geo-spatial analysis.

The Herald data desk also shared the

GitHub page for the New Zealand Herald

, which contains fledgling open source repositories.

Rob Coup, from Koordinates, shared the data sources available at LINZ and gave a preview of the soon-to-be-released base maps.

Other upcoming events related to open data include Govhack in June and Open Source/Open Society in April.

Further links:
Open data handbook
Data.govt.nz
FYI.org.nz - Make a new Official Information Act request
LINZ data service
Koordinates
Census data from Statistics NZ
Landcare Research Information Systems
Statschat
Aaron Schiff on Open Data Day
Herald Data Blog

Tim Berners-Lee TED talk on open data from 2009