On June 27th and June 28th, as part of the Pre-OKCon 2011 events we are inviting You (yes: you!) to a Screen Scraping Day with ScraperWiki! We are delighted to have Julian Todd in Berlin who will chair the Workshop.
Is your data spread over the web? In different formats? Messy? Then come to the ScraperWiki workshop to find out how to make your data work for you. Bring data you want to dig.
We will focus on Berlin Local Public Sector Information and other available Data. Participants will be led to take available public sector data, convert it to an open, structured format, and publish the result on the Web so that others can build on their work (Just as our friends did with the Big Clean).
It`s a one-day workshop dedicated to improving the quality of the data produced by the public sector bodies. Its aim is to transform unstructured data (e.g., HTML pages) that can be found on the websites of public institutions into richer, structured data. Such data can processed automatically with a greater efficiency, can be fed directly into data analysis and information visualisation tools to discover new insights, provide a source for a newspaper article or a report, or power a new application.
Shouldn’t all the publicly accessible data be also legally and technically re-usable?
The German government is starting to move towards open government data, but the change will take time.
* What kind of data my city or local government has?
* How screen scrapers are programmed, is it difficult?
* Is it legal to make a screen scraper and republish the data, how to avoid juridical problems?
The Twitter hash-tag for the workshop is #okcon2011
OKCon2011 is glad to announce that registration has now opened for the pre-OKCon workshops. More details can be found below.
Pre-OKCon2011 CKAN Workshop
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 from 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM (GMT+0100)
A chance to get hands-on with the technical side of working with CKAN. In each session, a core CKAN developer will talk through the aspect, giving a live demo. Subjects will cover installing CKAN, through customising its theme and forms and go on to extending it in several ways. We welcome participants bringing a laptop and having a go with the examples provided, or work on your own stuff, whilst drawing on the support of CKAN developers.
Workshop leaders: James Gardner, David Read
Sessions will cover:
using the API
installing a CKAN instance
theming CKAN
introduction to the architecture
form customisation
writing extensions
CKAN core code sprint (participants pairing up with core devs)
To register for the workshop, please use the event’s eventbrite page
Getting Involved with OpenSpending
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 from 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM (GMT+0100)
The workshop will deliver in-depth working sessions on the features of OpenSpending. We will work with EU spending data, modelling, visualizing and exploring interesting features of the data. The workshop is aimed at journalists, researchers, developers and anyone else who’s interested in public spending!
Workshop leader: Friedrich Lindenberg
Working sessions will include:
Financial data types, sources & acquisition, refinement
Visualization, analysis and exploration of data
Contextualising the data: story telling and analysis
To register for the workshop, please use the event’s eventbrite page.
For any queries regarding the workshops please contact: daniel [dot] dietrich [at] okfn [dot] org
On June 27th and June 28th, as part of the Pre-OKCon 2011 events we are inviting You (yes: you!) to a Screen Scraping Day with ScraperWiki! We are delighted to have Julian Todd in Berlin who will chair the Workshop. 
