If you are working with data chances are that sooner or later you will come across XML – or if you don’t, then, well, you should do. Really. There are some very useful resources in XML format – and in RSS, which is based on XML – from ongoing feeds and static reference files to XML that is provided in
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This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here. Human capital So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist. Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies
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Now this is an example of what’s possible with open data and some very clever thinking. Chris Taggart blogs about a new tool on his OpenlyLocal platform that allows you to send a Freedom of Information (FOI) request based on a particular item of spending. “This further lowers the barriers to armchair auditors wanting to understand where the money goes,
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In the week that a general election is called, Heather Brooke’s latest book couldn’t have been better timed. The Silent State is a staggeringly ambitious piece of work that pierces through the fog of the UK’s bureaucracies of power to show how they work, what is being hidden, and the inconsistencies underlying the way public money is spent. Like her
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MySociety, the non-profit organisation led by Tom Steinberg, has redesigned their TheyWorkforYou.com website with data about UK Parliamentary politics. The site provides easily accessible records of the UK Parliamentary process, and now contains data going back to 1935. The immediate benefit for journalists is that the records going back this far are now far more accessible than previously. Previously, the
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The following is the first in a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at the first: “The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and
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