Frictionless Data last Community Call of the year 2022
On December 22nd, for our last community call of the year, we had a nice discussion with Oleg Lavrovsky, an old friend of Open Knowledge Foundation, board member of the Swiss chapter, and valued member of the Frictionless Data community, about Data Package as a Service.
Oleg together with Thorben Westerhuys (remember his spatiotemporal covid 19 vaccination tracker he presented in March 2021 (opens new window)?) already made a first attempt at this in 2019, as you can see in this GitHub repo here (opens new window). The repository works as a template to create a quick API around your Frictionless Data Package. This solution is based on the Falcon micro framework (opens new window) and the Pandas Data Package Reader (opens new window).
More recently Edgar Zanella from the Frictionless Data core team also worked on an experimental solution (opens new window), converting a Data Package to SQLite database and using Datasette (opens new window) to have a JSON API (opens new window) over the data. The advantage of this solution is that the way of querying the data is going to be familiar for those that knows SQL (opens new window).
Then in November 2022, during the GLAMhack 2022 in Mendrisio, an API for Frictionless Data Packages was needed again to be able to sort data and view it on a map. The end result was a Living Herbarium app (opens new window).
So Oleg decided to pitch the idea of Frictionless Data Packages as services, as a challenge at the DINAcon hacknights (opens new window) in Bern. The challenge was not picked by anyone at the hackathon itself, but it sparked a conversation in our community chat (opens new window).
If you are also interested in joining the conversation, just get on the thread in the community chat. If you need a bit of context, you can of course rewatch Oleg’s presentation:
It was also noted during the call that 2 other excellent ways to get a quick API for Frictionless Data Packages are:
The Flat Data project (opens new window), developed on top of an idea by Simon Willison, allows (among other things) to have a quick API for your Data Package.
CKAN, since CKAN provides APIs. For example via CKAN-embed (opens new window), a widget for embedding live data searches from CKAN data portals into external websites.
# Join us next month!
Next community call is on January 26th and we are going to hear about Frictionless Data and DCAT from Matteo Fortini.
You can sign up for the call already here (opens new window). Do you want to share something with the community? Let us know when you sign up.
And if you have a cool project that you would like to show to the community, please let us know! You can just fill out this form (opens new window), or come and tell us on our community chat on Slack (opens new window) (also via Matrix (opens new window)). See you there!
# Call Recording
On a final note, here is the recording of the full call: