The first six community calls of 2021 - a recap.
We are halfway through 2021 (aka 2020 part two), and we thought it would be a good moment to look back at all that has happened in the Frictionless Community over these past 6 months. We’re so grateful for everyone in the community - thanks for your contributions, discussions, and participation! A big part of the community is our monthly call, so in case you’ve missed any of the community calls of 2021, here is a quick recap.
We started the year with a great presentation by Carles Pina i Estany. Carles is a very active member of our community and also a tool-fund grantee. He presented his tool-fund project: Frictionless schema-collaboration (opens new window). What is that? It’s a system that uses Data Package Creator to enable data managers and researchers to create and share dataset schemas, edit them, post messages and export the schemas in different formats (like text, Markdown or PDF). It is a very useful tool because before researchers communicated with data managers via email for each data package they were publishing. Frictionless schema-collaboration makes it easy and faster to communicate.
February was a great month, we started improving the documentation of the Frictionless Framework website (opens new window) together with the community and we had a brilliant code demonstration of the newly-released Frictionless Python Framework by senior developer Evgeny Karev at the monthly community call. How great was that? That particular call broke the record of attendance, it was fantastic to have so many of you there! And in case you were not there, we recorded Evgeny’s demo and you can watch it on YouTube.
March marked one year since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe and the Americas. It seemed fair to dedicate that community call to Covid-19 data, so we had Thorben Westerhuys presenting his project on Frictionless vaccination data. Thorben developed a spatiotemporal tracker for state level covid vaccination data in Germany (opens new window) to solve the problems linked to governments publishing vaccination data not parsed for machines. His vaccination scraper takes that data, reformats it and makes it available to everyone in a structured, more machine readable form.
At the end of April we had an interactive session with the Frictionless Fellows (opens new window). Daniel Alcalá López, Kate Bowie, Katerina Drakoulaki, Anne Lee, Jacqueline Maasch, Evelyn Night and Samantha Wilairat took some time to tell the community about their journey through Open Science. They also shared with the community some of the things they learnt during their 9-months fellowship and how they plan to integrate them to their work. This cohort of fellows made us very proud, they were a true joy to work with. Keep an eye on them all, they will be leaders in Open Science! And in case you are interested in becoming a Frictionless Fellow, we are currently recruiting the 3rd cohort. More info on the programme and how to apply here (opens new window).
During the April call we also got a short presentation on instant APIs for small Frictionless Data-powered apps by Oleg Lavrovsky. Oleg is also an active member of our community, you have probably already met him at many of our calls.
May started gloriously with csv,conf, where we had two talks on Frictionless Data. One was by the Fellows, and the other one was by Simon Tyrrell. On top of the one at csv,conf, Simon gave a presentation together with Xingdong Bian about their Frictionless Data for Wheat project (opens new window) at the monthly call. Simon and Xingdong are researchers at the Earlham Institute, and they are both tool-fund grantees, like Carles. They presented their project to the community and explained how they use Frictionless Data to make their large amount of data available, usable and interoperable for everyone.
The last call we had was in June, also featuring a tool-fund grantee: Nikhil Vats. Nikhil presented the Frictionless Data Package integration he developed for InterMine (opens new window), an open source biological data warehouse that creates databases of biological data accessed by sophisticated web query tools. Nikhil’s integration makes users’ queries more useful, as it describes all the fields of their query, specifically: name of field, type of field, class path, field and class ontology link.
In the same call, Michael Amadi announced the release of Data Blend, a great project using Frictionless Data. If you find it cool and would like to know more about it, read this case-study (opens new window), but also make sure you don’t miss the October community call, because we will be hearing a presentation on it!
July’s call was canceled last minute, but it has been rescheduled to August 12th, and it’s going to be extremely interesting! In case you did not sign up yet, please do here (opens new window). We will be hearing from Dave Rowe (aka Libraries Hacked (opens new window)) and how he uses Frictionless Data specs and standards for public libraries open data.
This first 2021 semester was also great because we completed our website redesign (opens new window) and we added two great tools to the Frictionless Data toolkit: Livemark (opens new window) and Frictionless Repository (opens new window). These tools get better and better everyday thanks to the precious contributions of the community. Thanks to you all, for making the Frictionless Data project so great. Nothing could have happened without you!