Tool Fund Grantee: Open Knowledge Greece
This grantee profile features Open Knowledge Greece for our series of Frictionless Data Tool Fund posts, written to shine a light on Frictionless Data’s Tool Fund grantees, their work and to let our technical community know how they can get involved.
Open Knowledge Greece (opens new window), formally appointed as the Greek Chapter of Open Knowledge International, was established in 2012 by a group of academics, developers, citizens, hackers and State representatives. We are supported by a national network of volunteers, most of whom are experienced professionals in the fields of Computer Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Journalism, Agriculture etc.
Our team consists of community members who are interested in open data, linked data technologies, coding, data journalism, and who do their best in applying scientific results into community activities.
We were very excited when we read about Frictionless Data on the Open Knowledge International blog (opens new window) and have been following the progress of the project carefully. When we saw the Frictionless Data Tool Fund had been announced (opens new window), we were certain that we wanted to be part of this project and build tools that can help in removing the friction in working with data.
People and organizations working with data are interested in analyzing, visualizing or building apps based on data, but they end up spending most of their time cleaning and preparing the data.
Frictionless Data software and specifications aim to make data ready for use. There are a lot of open data repositories in different formats and they often include dirty and missing data with null values, dates, currencies, units and identifiers which are represented differently and need effort to make them usable. Moreover datasets from different sources have different licenses, are often not up to date and inconsistencies make including in in one analysis difficult.
We received the Frictionless Data Tool Fund grant for the development of libraries in R language. R is a powerful open source programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics that is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.
We are going to implement two Frictionless Data libraries in R - Table Schema (opens new window) for publishing and sharing tabular-style data and Data Package (opens new window) for describing a coherent collection of data in a single package, keeping the frictionless data specifications (opens new window). Comments, forks, and pull requests welcome in the two repositories.
Users will be able to load a data package into R in seconds so that data can be used for analysis and visualizations, invalid data can be fixed and generally friction is removed in working with data especially when shifting from one language to another. For example you will be able to get and analyze a data package in R which will in turn make visualizations in other graphical interfaces easier.
We are also very delighted to be hosting Open Knowledge Festival (opens new window) (OKFest) in Thessaloniki, Greece from 3-6 May 2018. OKFest is expected to bring together over 1,500 people from more than 60 countries. During the four-day full program of the Festival, participants will work together to share their skills and experiences, build the very tools and partnerships that will further the power of openness as a positive force for change. Open Knowledge Greece CEO Dr. Charalampos Bratsas (opens new window) and the rest team are very excited to host the biggest gathering of the open knowledge community in our country. Look out for OKFest updates on the website and on Twitter (opens new window).
Interested in learning more about OK Greece? See our Facebook (opens new window) page, read our blog (opens new window) and watch our videos on Youtube (opens new window).