Core Data Curators - Introductions

Welcome, Enric, and nice to meet you too. I’m currently based in London. Are you living nearby?

Thanks, Santiago! No, I am based in Almería. Just got back to Spain after spending eight years living abroad (first four in the UK -one in London-, the rest in China).

Hi Everyone, I’m Robb. My background is in software engineering and law. My current work is in getting the world’s restaurant health inspections online, and publishing law in an accessible way.

My skills are the US legal system and intellectual property law, git and GitHub, software architecture, and languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, and Javascript.

I’m interested in contributing because I’m already working to make more data open, and I can see that I have the skills to contribute here.

Good to meet everyone!

Welcome Robb - great to have your participation!

Hello everyone, sorry for joining late.
I am Mahroof, a civil engineer - urban planner from India, currently working for pas.org.in, an action research project with grants from the Gates Foundation. I am deeply interested in GIS and spatial analysis, and data wrangling and analysis is a key skill. I am part of a growing open data community in India (datameet.org) and am organizer of the local chapter in our City, Ahmedabad, trying to coalesce an open data community here. Hope to learn from you all, and to contribute to OKFN.

Hello everybody,

I am Yann-Aël, and work as a postdoc researcher in machine learning/big data/bioinformatics at the University of Brussels. As programming languages, I mostly use R, and occasionally Python.

Interested in open data initiatives, and willing to contribute here to make some more public data easily available.

Hi, I tried to start an OKLab in Fürth/Nürnberg, but did not find any potential collaborators yet. I want to throw in some volunteer work now to get more involved with the OK community.

I’m working as a freelance developer … have a long background as a data analyst … especially experienced in data wrangling with Excel (focused on vba) … data management with Sql Server … working in c#, t-sql, javascript, some python (for scraping), some php (re Wordpress) … academic background is political science and communication science … and I’m enthusiastic about the Open Data Movement.

When fiddling with open datasets (from govdata.de) I saw that many of the csv-files show rather unusual and non-standard formats - with leading lines before the actual data table starts and with multi-line headers. This is bad. It makes the data impossible to consume automatically and requires some manual cleaning before files can be read in. So data curation is a major issue.

Hello everybody,

My name is Alex and I have an economic data website at econfactbook.org. I am interested in creating new ways to organize economic data. I have experience using excel and python. I also have experience finding economic data on the internet. I want to contribute to Core Datasets because economic data needs to be more accessible to the public.

@alexpeek1 welcome Alex and thanks for introducing yourself! If any general questions arise around the Core Datasets effort please just open a thread here in the forum Core Datasets - Open Knowledge Forums

Hi, all! I’m Hoony, Jang an organizer of Code for Seoul in South Korea.

I’ve uploaded some spending data on openspending.org and developed wheredoesmymoneygo.kr in last year and getoutofdebt.kr using korean local govs debt data. (I was participated in ok festival 2014!) I’m mainly doing web programming, but love data so that studying hard data science now.

I heard about this project from @jgkim . there are lots of open data in Korea but not much related to transparency I think. So I’d like to contribute to core data project to make this environment which is hard to civic hacking better.

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Welcome, @thechunsik!

Could you leave your introduction as a reply to the about post of the South Korea local group so that I can give you the OK South Korea badge. And why don’t you introduce yourself to the Open Knowledge community? :smile:

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Hi there,
I am Kostis Iliakis from Athens, Greece. I’m just a few steps away from graduating as a Computer Engineer. I like taking part in all sorts of different projects and getting used to different things and technologies. I find @rufuspollock dream about Open Knowledge really cool and that’s why I would like to contribute as much as I can. My skills include programming languages like python, javascript, bash, C/C++, Java, MySql and many more but the most important is the ability and will to learn and be improved.
That’s all about me, hope we have fun the upcoming months!
Cheers

@kostis welcome! Also @thechunsik - really good to see you here. Ditto @ManfredKipfelsberger

First step is to take a quick look at the Core Data Curator’s guide: http://data.okfn.org/doc/core-data-curators

Then I recommend starting to look through the current queue of datasets: Issues · datasets/awesome-data · GitHub and either picking an item to work on or suggesting a new dataset we should include.

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Hi

I am a Belgian with a wide array of interests. I am a mathematics professor at the University of Zurich, a python instructor and one of the participants in an OpenData project in mathematical research (a work package within the http://www.OpenDreamKit.org project funded by the EU). I like to theorise about data, information and knowledge and the changes that their commodification will bring to the XXIst century economy, and subsequent evolutions in the law and societal norms (particularly in education, science and journalism).

If the frictionless data" project is horizontal, I and am also curious about the “vertical” direction and a strategy for “frictionless information”. As a consequence I am passively participating in lots of groups working on metadata standardization (Research Data Alliance, Global Alliance for Genomic Health, Citizen Science metadata standards, etc).

I would like to actively contribute here as a managing curator, and am certainly looking for it!

Paul

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Hi all,

My name is James G. Kim and I have been working with Web technologies for more than a decade, and has developed strong enthusiasm for the Web, especially of data and services. From witnessing how the Web has evolved over time, I have developed a strong belief that innovation can be cultivated through openness and collaboration. In this regard, I’m currently working on a few projects related to, or directly using open data. Far from perfect, but I can code so I believe I can do some of data wrangling and sleuthing. :wink: Since now I’m working on some data including countries and regions, what I’m going to work on first will be related to #132, #136, or #137.

Cheers,
James

Hi,

Im David Roff, working in Supply Chain and Freight Forwarding, we develop software for our company and also contribute to an EU project which aims at removing the risk in supply chains around the world. Working with HMRC, UN/Cefact and One Government at the Border

Thought it was time to introduce myself as have contributed in the past and will continue to do so, use of code lists in the transport industry is a common problem, even when standardised they are all in different formats and restrictions in the UN currently prohibit the use of propriety software to share the data (I’m working on it!) find the datasets project easy to contribute useful data to and get information in a structured format that is common and useable.

Any questions feel free to message me on here or on github.

Thanks

David

Hey David, glad to have read your introduction after all the work you have put in so far into a few datasets!

Hi Paul,

Likewise it’s useful to read about people who are contributing and why! There are so many interesting projects out there. Thanks for taking the time to read about me and reach out

Feel free to message me anytime if you feel I can help out on anything

Best regards

David

Hello all.

My name is Gustavo, I am 23 years old and I am based in Portugal. My academic background comes from Economics and Management and when I finished my education, while I can’t find a job, I started learning other skills - namely programming. I believe that by making data accessible, we are empowering other individuals to start their other projects, businesses, investigations and what-not. The feeling is ultra satisfying, even though I started pretty recently. I am sure we will be able to achieve something great here.

I have tried rebooting Open Economics two times now and since my recent inspiration to work with open data was to create datasets and datapackages and, as Rufus suggested, I will contribute to this project from now on and will put some of this knowledge in practise in other Portuguese projects we have here. Hopefully, I will gain enough knowledge here to contribute back to the development of tools to improve our work and, hopefully, provide better results in the end.

If you need/want to, you can get in touch with me in many ways. Check my profile if you seek any contact. Feel free to do so!

Best regards,
Gustavo.

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Hey folks, I just signed up over at that form over there.

I’m Luke and I’m hacking on carbondoomsday.com (you can read something about that over here too), which is a project which is motivated from no nice, modern UI for CO2 emissions tracker on the web today. We’re currently exposing records from the Mauna Loa observatory but after talking to the people from Open Climate Data, I started to think about packaging up the data in different formats.

So, I found datahub.io, which is awesome. So, I thought a good first step would be to sign up and introduce myself here and see where it goes. I’m not sure how you’re organising this but one of my priorities would be to package our data on datahub.io (if it is not already there) but otherwise, I’m happy to help in other ways!

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