Whenever a new open data dataset is released, the #opendata wires hum a little more. More open data is a Good Thing, right? Why? Haven’t we got enough already?
In a blog post a few weeks ago, Alan Levine, aka @cogdog, set about Stalking the Mythical OER Reuse: Seeking Non-Blurry Videos. OERs are open educational resources, openly licensed materials produced by educators and released to the world so others could make use of them. Funding was put into developing and releasing them and then, … what?
OERs. People build them. People house them in repositories. People do journal articles, conference presentations, research on them. I doubt never their existence.
But the ultimate thing they are supposed to support, maybe their raison d’être – the re use by other educators, what do we have to show for that except whispered stories, innuendo, and blurry photos in the forest?
–Alan Levine
Alan went in search of the OER reuse in his own inimitable way…
… but came back without much success. He then used the rest of the post to put out all for stories about how OERs have actually been used in the world… Not just mythical stories, not coulds and mights: real examples.
So what about opendata – is there much use, or reuse, going on there?
It seems as is more datasets get opened every day, but is there more use every day, first day use of newly released datasets, incremental reuse of the datasets that are already out, linkage between the new datasets and the previously released ones.
Yesterday, I spotted via @owenboswarva the release of a dataset that aggregated and normalised data relating to charitable grant awards: A big day for charity data. Interesting… The supporting website – 360 Giving – (self-admittedly in it’s early days) allows you to search by funder, recipient or key word. You have to search using the right keywords, though, and the right capitalisation of keywords…
And you may have to add in white space.. so *University of Oxford * as well as *University of Oxford*.
I don’t want to knock the site, but I am really interested to know how this data might be used. Really. Genuinely. I am properly interested. How would someone working in the charitable sector use that website to help them do something? What thing? How would it support them? My imagination may be able to go off on crazy flights of fancy in certain areas, but my lack of sector knowledge or a current headful of summer cold leaves me struggling to work out what this website would tangibly help someone to do. (I tried to ask a similar question around charities data before, giving the example of Charities Commission data grabbed from OpenCharities, but drew a blank then.) Like @cogdog in his search for real OER use case stories, I’d love to hear examples of real questions – no matter how trivial – that the 360 Giving site could help answer.
As well as the website, 360 Giving folk provide a data download as a CSV file containing getting on for a quarter of a million records. The date stamp on the file I grabbed is 5th June 2014. Skimming through the data quickly – my own opening conversation with it can be found here: 360 Giving Grant Navigator – Initial Data Conversation – I noticed through comparison with the data on the website some gaps…
this item doesn’t seem to appear in the CSV download, perhaps because it doesn’t appear to have a funder?
this item on the website has an address for the recipient organisation, but the CSV document doesn’t have any address fields. In fact, on close inspection, the record relates to a grant by the Northern Rock Foundation, and I see no records from that body in the CSV file?
Although there is a project title field in the CSV document, no project titles are supplied. Looking through a sample of grants on the website, are any titles provided?
The website lists the following funders:
Arts Council England
Arts Council Wales
Big Lottery
Creative Scotland
DSDNI
Heritage Lottery Fund
Indigo Trust
Nesta
Nominet Trust
Northern Rock Foundation
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Sport England
Sport Northern Ireland
Sport Wales
TSB
Wellcome Trust
The CSV file has data from these funders:
Arts Council England
Arts Council Wales
Big Lottery
Creative Scotland
DSDNI
Nesta
Nominet Trust
Sport England
Sport Northern Ireland
Sport Wales
TSB
Wellcome Trust
That is, the CSV contains a subset of the data on the website; data from Heritage Lottery Fund, Indigo Trust, Northern Rock Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation doesn’t seem to have made it into the data download? I also note that data from the Research Councils’ Gateway to Research (aside from the TSB data) doesn’t seem to have made it into either dataset. For anyone researching grants to universities, this could be useful information. (Could?! Why?!;-)
No company numbers or Charity Numbers are given. Using opendata from Companies House a quick join on recipient names and company names from the Companies House register (without any attempts at normalising out things like LTD and LIMITED – that is, purely looking for an exact match) gives me just over 15,000 matched company names (which means I now have their address, company number, etc. too). And presumably if I try to match on names from the OpenCharities data, I’ll be able to match some charity numbers. Now both these annotations will be far from complete, but they’d be more than we have at the moment. A question to then ask is – is this better or worse? Does the dataset only have value if it is in some way complete? One of the clarion calls for open data initiatives has been to ‘just get the data out there’ so that it can be started to be worked on, and improved on. So presumably having some company numbers of charity numbers matched is a plus?
Now I know there is a risk to this. Funders may want to not release details about the addresses of the charities of they are funding because that data may be used to plot maps to say “this is where the money’s going” when it isn’t. The charity may have a Kensington address and the received funding for an initiative in Oswaldtwistle, but the map might see all the money sinking into Kensington; which would be wrong. But that’s where you have to start educating the data users. Or releasing data fields like “address of charity” and “postcode area of point of use”, or whatever, even if the latter is empty. As it is, if you give me a charity or company name, I can look up it’s address. And its company or charity number if it has one.
As I mentioned, I don’t want to knock the work 360 Giving have done, but I’m keen to understand what it is they have done, what they haven’t done, and what the opendata they have aggregated and re-presented could – practically, tractably, tangibly – be used for. Really used for.
Time to pack my bags and head out into the wood, maybe…
