The DataTank can be used to create a RESTful web-service in almost no time. Together with the Belgian incubating chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation we have implemented The DataTank for a hackaton for the city of Ghent. Apps For Ghent an event with students, hackers, professionals and policy makers. Together they discuss open data in their own way. Students and hackers get to participate in a hackaton with beautiful prices, professionals get to help and interview the students, the policy makers get to speak about their dos and don’ts, and so on.

We started by checking out the data sets available at http://data.gent.be. Some datasets were structured in nice CSV files or XLS files which just needed one PUT request to get plugged into The DataTank. Soon we saw that a lot of files on the site were formatted as KML. As we did not have a generic way to add those to The DataTank, we quickly implemented this in 200 lines of code.Soon we had http://data.appsforghent.be up and running, providing a RESTful API for a lot of datasets. All that was left for us to do was creating some new formatters like the map, the grid and the charts (thanks to Lieven Janssen), and creating the portal. The portal is a small PHP script which reads the self documenting resource http://data.appsforghent.be/TDTInfo/Resources to generate hyperlinks.

Click on the picture for a live version

As the city of Ghent has De Lijn as a bus company, and NMBS as a railway company, we did 2 final PUT requests to the server to add remote resources from The DataTank at http://data.iRail.be. Now you can use the iRail API as if it were Apps For Ghent resources.

The advantages of an API

During the event developers and users of the data can point the city at errors in the datasets. Changing a value in the datasets is easy as all applications will be using the Apps For Ghent API.

During the hackaton there will be live statistics on how many times each resource get hit. Because you score less creativity points if you use a dataset that gets used by everyone, participants will be able to preemptively choose datasets that get used less.

For now, join the fun at http://www.appsforghent.be

- Pieter

Bronze

In the speech Neelie mentions the Open Data portals of the UK, Denmark and France – who last week opened data.gouv.fr – as heroes in Open Data work. And indeed they are heroes! But if we take a look at Tim Berner’s Lee suggested 5 star scheme for Linked Open Data we see that most of the Open Government Data portals currently available on the web only reach the second star. I would give them the bronze medal but why won’t we go for gold?

Gold

Well that’s precisely where The DataTank comes in to help. We see the 5 star scheme as a step-by-step process and The DataTank as the tool that can assist you to reach the fifth star.

Get Started

In our Get Started section you can see how we open up proprietary data formats (excel and shape files) from data.gov.uk and dati.gov.it into a RESTful API which returns Open Standards such as JSON, XML and RDF:

• Creating an excel resource
• Creating a shape resource

Now it’s your turn!

Why not give it a try for yourself? Install a datatank instance and open up some data from Open Government Data portals in Europe:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Denmark
• France
• Ireland
• Italy
• Norway
• Spain
• The Netherlands
• United Kingdom