Frictionless Data Community Call June 2023
On June 29th we had our last monthly call, and it was kind of a special one! Instead of the usual project presentation, we had a hands-on session on strange datasets and how to describe them.
Our community member Jesper Zedlitz comes regularly across very weird datasets in his day-to-day work, and had asked in the May community call, whether it was possible to bring some of them to the call and check them out together with the community to try to make sense of them all together. This turned out to be an excellent idea for a fun call!
So what kind of problems is Jesper encountering?
Sometimes we have extra information on the dataset, the licence, etc. at the beginning and comments at the end of the csv, so some rows need to be ignored. This is easy to do for the top part of the dataset, but it’s harder for the bottom part. Something we will definitely need to think about for the next iteration of the Frictionless specs, for example by giving the possibility to have a “headline row”, or something like that. This was a common problem for other community members too.
Sometimes we don’t have any information at all: Jesper showed us some CSVs without any headerlines, where it’s up to you to figure out what kind of data is in there.
The dialect (e.g. weird delimiters) and character encoding are sometimes tricky too, but that’s already easy to manage with the Frictionless specs.
Do you want to know more about the strange datasets that Jesper has shown us during the call? Then you should watch the full recording of the call:
# Join us in August!
Exceptionally we won’t have any community call in July, so see you all on August 31st!
Do you have something you would like to present to the community at one of the upcoming calls? Let us know via this form (opens new window), or come and tell us on our community chat on Slack (opens new window)(also accessible via a Matrix bridge (opens new window) if you prefer to use an open protocol) .
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.