Lin Clark

Turning the CIA's data into pretty pictures on your site using Views

Submitted by Lin on

There are a lot of data providers who publish their data openly for reuse. Surprisingly, the CIA is one of them.

Because of this, data geeks can take it and turn it into something that's easy for others to reuse, using open data formats. And because it's available in an open data format, platforms like Kasabi can load it on to their big servers and provide ways for other sites to access and query it, like a SPARQL endpoint. And because it is provided in a SPARQL endpoint, it is easy to reuse it in your Drupal site using Views.

This screencast shows how you can access the CIA World Factbook (or data in any SPARQL endpoint) and reuse the content on your site.

Comments

Thank you again

No originality from others said, but it's normal : awesome tutorial, and the possibilities look endless... Long live open data !

Just thanks

Hi

Thanks for this series of tutorials , they're well done and exactly what I've been dying do dive into.

Alan

 

 

GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out)

The tutorial is great, but the data set is not. It appears it is quite out of date when compared with the data actually shown at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ag.html.

For example, GDP (official exchange rate) is reported to be $160.3 billion on the CIA's website. The Kasabi dataset reports $92.22 billion. Virtually all the data is off with the exception of, perhaps, the name of the country. Oops! Then there's South Sudan!

Anyway, this is a GREAT and POWERFUL way to propagate crap data all over the web in 15 minutes or so! Gotta love how easy Drupal makes it!

Yes, the extraction from the

Yes, the extraction from the CIA factbook isn't really maintained in a live fashion. I chose it because it is a large scale dataset that is better for demonstration than other datasets because people understand the data that it contains, but it isn't appropriate for building applications on top of since it isn't regularly updated.

I should have an example of a more actively maintained and much more useful dataset soon. People in the Drupal community have heard me talking about it and I will be screencasting it in the next two months or so.

Well, in that case ...

Let me repeat, the tutorial is great! It's one of the few that got me really thinking about some exciting possibilities, but I nearly cried when I saw that George W. Bush was still listed as "chief of state."

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