So I’ve just been to the Open Data Hack Day in Oxford which was good fun. Met some cool people, wrote a lot of code and drank some brandy.<\/p>\n
My team was playing around with using dbpedia<\/a>‘s data mixed with geo-location to find you an interesting fact about where you currently are. We had a lot of fun with it — the final results are here:<\/p>\n It does some neat things. It uses javascript to ask your browser where you are, or failing that to use the wikipedia name of a city, the lat\/long or use the postcode. http:\/\/data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk\/id\/postcodeunit\/SO171BJ<\/a> will give you the lat & long thanks to @gothwin.<\/p>\n It then attmpets to find nearby places on wikipedia which are the hometown of something. It does this by searching for things within + or – 0.2 of a latitude and longitude (I know that’s not going to be a perfect square, but meh). If it finds nothing it doubles the search range and tries again until it does.<\/p>\n It then gets all the things that have the city as a hometown, picks one and renders a blue plaque.<\/p>\n For added sillyness, if there’s a image available, it has a little proxy<\/a> which downloads the image, shrinks it to no more than 300×300 to be phone-friendly, and makes it white-on-blue to match the plaque.<\/p>\n I stole the style of\u00a0 buttons at the bottom of the page from m.ox.ac.uk<\/a> which is an excellent example of how to make a website to work on a phone, rather than bothing making a specific phone app.<\/p>\n We won ‘most creative use of data’. Some of the other groups did more worthy things like visualise arts-funding data and make useful bus timetables so forth. One group had a great idea but didn’t get very far which was linked-data top-trumps. Each site in the linked data cloud<\/a> has quite a few stats<\/a> so you could probably do something cool with that. Most triples, most links to other datasets, most open license… Actually I wonder if there’s a tool out there which you can feed a csv and it’ll produce you nice pdfs of top-trump cards to print-out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I’ve just been to the Open Data Hack Day in Oxford which was good fun. Met some cool people, wrote a lot of code and drank some brandy. My team was playing around with using dbpedia‘s data mixed with geo-location to find you an interesting fact about where you currently are. We had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":572,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
![little proxy<\/a> which downloads the image, shrinks it to no more than 300×300 to be phone-friendly, and makes it white-on-blue to match the plaque.<\/p>\nI stole the style of\u00a0 buttons at the bottom of the page from m.ox.ac.uk<\/a> which is an excellent example of how to make a website to work on a phone, rather than bothing making a specific phone app.<\/p>\nWe won ‘most creative use of data’. Some of the other groups did more worthy things like visualise arts-funding data and make useful bus timetables so forth. One group had a great idea but didn’t get very far which was linked-data top-trumps. Each site in the linked data cloud<\/a> has quite a few stats<\/a> so you could probably do something cool with that. Most triples, most links to other datasets, most open license… Actually I wonder if there’s a tool out there which you can feed a csv and it’ll produce you nice pdfs of top-trump cards to print-out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So I’ve just been to the Open Data Hack Day in Oxford which was good fun. Met some cool people, wrote a lot of code and drank some brandy. My team was playing around with using dbpedia‘s data mixed with geo-location to find you an interesting fact about where you currently are. We had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":572,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/blueplaque\/imageproxy.php?img=http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/7\/7b\/Supergrass.jpg\"){kind=link}