4 ms·

France starts opening its data

111 points by geoffroy 15y ago

pefavre 15y ago
Good news, for once french gov shows the way.
- GiraffeNecktie 15y ago
  Or maybe just follows the pack. US, UK, Canada and others have been doing this for a while.
  - Ecio78 15y ago
    Italy is doing the same but as usual, too late and too slow: http://www.dati.gov.it/ http://www.dati.gov.it/
- tonfa 15y ago
  It is a step in the good direction, but there are still too many datasets where the best available version under an open licence is from the US (that's often the case for french geographical data).
  - nakkiel 15y ago
    Well, the US is actually the exception regarding GIS data; not France.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      That's true, and for more than GIS data, but it's nice to get alternate sources. Should improve both coverage and reliability, as well as reduce some systemic biases caused by which data is most available. For example, it's awkward that so many Wikipedia articles can only be illustrated with a photo of a non-American politician shaking an American president's hand, simply because no other freely licensed photos are available.
_delirium 15y ago
This is a lot more data than I expected for a launch! I guess they wanted to get a lot of stuff organized before going public with it. Looks like some useful data that wasn't previously publicly available (or available under a free-enough license), from some brief skimming. There's some discussion on the French OpenStreetMap list about using it in semi-automated fashion to improve French coverage on OSM, especially for things like landmarks and landforms outside of the major cities, or adding metadata to existing landmark nodes.
brohee 15y ago
It's a goldmine, there are 350k datasets available, and a lot of them that will not make some people happy (criminality by geographic zone for example). It opens possibilities to create a really nice multi-factor (e.g. crime, pollution, education) "best place to live" application. A lot of the data is available in a very manageable CSV, sadly some is only available in XLS that may be a bit harder to manipulate programmaticaly.
- hessenwolf 15y ago
  For the ones that aren't formatted randomly in Excel: library(RODBC) channel <- odbcConnectExcel("myExcelFile.xls") myDataFrame <- sqlFetch(channel, "Sheet1") odbcCloseAll() write.csv( file = paste("myExcelFile", "Sheet1.csv"), myDataFrame, row.names = F )
- thibaut_barrere 15y ago
  For XLS, be sure to check out Roo http://roo.rubyforge.org/ http://roo.rubyforge.org/ or use Java libraries and JRuby.
- BasDirks 15y ago
  for a pretty good python library: pip install xlrd
- 1100110101 15y ago
  What are the problems with catdoc's "xls2csv"? Or libxls (sourceforge)?
czzarr 15y ago
it's a step in the right direction but why isn't there an API ? seriously

111 points by geoffroy 15y ago

pefavre 15y ago

Good news, for once french gov shows the way.

GiraffeNecktie 15y ago
Or maybe just follows the pack. US, UK, Canada and others have been doing this for a while.
- Ecio78 15y ago
  Italy is doing the same but as usual, too late and too slow: http://www.dati.gov.it/ http://www.dati.gov.it/
tonfa 15y ago
It is a step in the good direction, but there are still too many datasets where the best available version under an open licence is from the US (that's often the case for french geographical data).
- nakkiel 15y ago
  Well, the US is actually the exception regarding GIS data; not France.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    That's true, and for more than GIS data, but it's nice to get alternate sources. Should improve both coverage and reliability, as well as reduce some systemic biases caused by which data is most available. For example, it's awkward that so many Wikipedia articles can only be illustrated with a photo of a non-American politician shaking an American president's hand, simply because no other freely licensed photos are available.

_delirium 15y ago

This is a lot more data than I expected for a launch! I guess they wanted to get a lot of stuff organized before going public with it. Looks like some useful data that wasn't previously publicly available (or available under a free-enough license), from some brief skimming. There's some discussion on the French OpenStreetMap list about using it in semi-automated fashion to improve French coverage on OSM, especially for things like landmarks and landforms outside of the major cities, or adding metadata to existing landmark nodes.

brohee 15y ago

It's a goldmine, there are 350k datasets available, and a lot of them that will not make some people happy (criminality by geographic zone for example). It opens possibilities to create a really nice multi-factor (e.g. crime, pollution, education) "best place to live" application. A lot of the data is available in a very manageable CSV, sadly some is only available in XLS that may be a bit harder to manipulate programmaticaly.

hessenwolf 15y ago
For the ones that aren't formatted randomly in Excel: library(RODBC) channel <- odbcConnectExcel("myExcelFile.xls") myDataFrame <- sqlFetch(channel, "Sheet1") odbcCloseAll() write.csv( file = paste("myExcelFile", "Sheet1.csv"), myDataFrame, row.names = F )
thibaut_barrere 15y ago
For XLS, be sure to check out Roo http://roo.rubyforge.org/ http://roo.rubyforge.org/ or use Java libraries and JRuby.
BasDirks 15y ago
for a pretty good python library: pip install xlrd
1100110101 15y ago
What are the problems with catdoc's "xls2csv"? Or libxls (sourceforge)?

czzarr 15y ago

it's a step in the right direction but why isn't there an API ? seriously