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"Data docs is a video platform that allows filmmakers and journalist to combine elements from the web, such as interactive graphics, text and scraped information, with linear media, such as video and audio. Having worked in video both in long-form documentary and web video, we understand the power of visual media. Videos are powerful vehicles that we can use to tell personable or explanatory immersive stories. But one of the drawbacks of video as a medium is that they are finished products, which, after they have been published, become outdated fairly quickly. Advances in technology and data bases has allowed for data to be more flexible than video. Data visualizations and interactive infographics, for instance, can be up-to-date at any moment in time if they are hooked up to the right data bases. Think of charts of stock markets that updated every millisecond because APIs or other technological mechanisms feed them live data. We wanted to combine those two worlds - the world of immersive video storyelling and that of live and constantly updated data. This is why we created Data Docs. Through the Data Docs code library filmmakers and developers can 'hook up' their video to live data and other up-to-date information from the web. The library also allows you to integrate your own interactives with specific fonts and styles into your video. It enables you to project HTML, CSS and JavaScript-based graphics on your video. This helps you make videos that will never be out of date or, in other words, to make videos that are evergreen."

ELAN description ELAN is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources. With ELAN a user can add an unlimited number of annotations to audio and/or video streams. An annotation can be a sentence, word or gloss, a comment, translation or a description of any feature observed in the media. Annotations can be created on multiple layers, called tiers. Tiers can be hierarchically interconnected. An annotation can either be time-aligned to the media or it can refer to other existing annotations. The textual content of annotations is always in Unicode and the transcription is stored in an XML format. ELAN provides several different views on the annotations, each view is connected and synchronized to the media playhead. Up to 4 video files can be associated with an annotation document. Each video can be integrated in the main document window or displayed in its own resizable window. ELAN delegates media playback to an existing media framework, like Windows Media Player, QuickTime or JMF (Java Media Framework). As a result a wide variety of audio and video formats is supported and high performance media playback can be achieved. ELAN is written in the Java programming language and the sources are available for non-commercial use. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

ITA Software is proud to introduce Needlebase™, a revolutionary platform for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web. Using Needlebase through a web browser, without programmers or DBAs, your data team can easily: acquire data from multiple sources: A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needlebase uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record. Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needlebase's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map. Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Needlebase dramatically reduces the time, cost, and expertise needed to build and maintain comprehensive databases of practically anything. Read on to learn more about Needlebase's capabilities and our early adopters' success stories, or watch our tutorial videos. Then sign up to get started! http://needlebase.com

How to: verify content from social media Experts advise on the process of verification Posted: 3 April 2012 By: Rachel McAthy 0 Comments and 0 Reactions Facebook and Twitter for how to There are a wealth of questions, tools and techniques journalists can use to verify content from social media The mass of information now available and being shared online offers a fantastic arena for journalists to engage with online communities and pick up on breaking news at the same time. This means journalists are also having to sharpen their verification and fact-checking skills in a digital environment. This how-to features advice from a panel of experts on the key considerations, questions and tools journalists should have in mind when carrying out verification of content that surfaces via social media, be it a news tip, an image, a piece of audio or video. The process covers three main stages: monitoring of social networks and the online community before news breaks, checking the content when it comes into play and subsequently reporting that content once verified. The comprehensive advice outlined in this how-to guide offers practical steps, specific questions and cross-checks journalists can make at each stage, as well as online tools to support them.

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts. How is it of use to journalists? "Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground," PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains. Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities. These features - and many more - let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject. Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists. Grill added: The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community. You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Again, US-centric, but this might generate some ideas of what could be accomplish in your city/nation. Late yesterday we announced a bunch of new features for Influence Explorer: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/ie-corporate-accountability/ As the blog post explains, you can now find information about a corporation's EPA violations, federal advisory committee memberships, and participation in the rulemaking process -- all in one place. I wanted to highlight that last feature a bit more, though. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full corpus of public comments submitted to regulations.gov has been available for bulk download and analysis. This isn't a coincidence: regulations.gov is built using technologies that make scraping it unusually difficult. This is unfortunate, since everyone seems to agree that federal rulemakings are gaining in importance -- both because of congressional gridlock that leaves the regulatory process as a second-best option, and because of calls to simplify the regulatory landscape as a pro-growth measure. It's an area where influence is certainly exerted -- rulemakers are obliged to review every comment -- but little attention is paid to who's flooding dockets with comments, and which directions rules are being pushed. It's taken us several months to develop a reliable solution and to obtain past rulemakings, but we now have the data in hand. We plan to do much more with this dataset, and we're hoping that others will want to dig in, too. You can find a link to the bulk download options in the post above -- the full compressed archive of extracted text and metadata is ~16GB, but we've provided options for grabbing individual agencies' or dockets' data. If anyone wants the original documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc) we can talk through how to make that happen, but as they clock in at 1.5TB we'll want to make sure folks know what they're getting into before we spend the time and bandwidth. Finally, note that we currently o

"Abstract Much of the data underlying global poverty and inequality estimates is not in the public domain, but can be accessed in small pieces using the World Bank's PovcalNet online tool. To overcome these limitations and reproduce this database in a format more useful to researchers, we ran approximately 23 million queries of the World Bank's web site, accessing only information that was already in the public domain. This web scraping exercise produced 10,000 points on the cumulative distribution of income or consumption from each of 942 surveys spanning 127 countries over the period 1977 to 2012. This short note describes our methodology, briefly discusses some of the relevant intellectual property issues, and illustrates the kind of calculations that are facilitated by this data set, including growth incidence curves and poverty rates using alternative PPP indices. The full data can be downloaded at www.cgdev.org/povcalnet. "

The new online Who Owns What Database launched by the Institute of Security Studies in Cape Town on Friday is making the assets and private interests of all elected officials available to the public for the first time. Originally launched in September 2009, the database of politicians' assets and onterests contained approximately 9000 financial disclosure records submitted between 2004 and 2010 by elected members in the National Assembly, National Cabinet, nine provincial legislatures and metropolitan councils. The database has recently been extended to include the latest financial disclosure records of elected local councillors from municipalities across the country. "What this means is that the public can access the financial disclosure forms of all elected politicians online," Collette Herzenberg, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, said at the launch of the database.

Another good model for other nations to emulate/build on. Congrats to the friends in SA.

"The Open Data Handbook This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to 'open' data. To get started, you may wish to look at the Introduction. You can navigate through the report using the Table of Contents (see sidebar or below). We warmly welcome comments on the text and will incorporate feedback as we go forward. We also welcome contributions or suggestions for additional sections and areas to examine."

SchemaSpy Graphical Database Schema Metadata Browser SourceForge.net Sample Output FAQ Download Release Notes Support SchemaSpy John Currier Recent Donors: Anonymous monocongoProject Donor chervitzProject DonorAccepting Donations Support SchemaSpy Do you hate starting on a new project and having to try to figure out someone else's idea of a database? Or are you in QA and the developers expect you to understand all the relationships in their schema? If so then this tool's for you. SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It's also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints.

New: World Health Organization (WHO) Releases Database on Nutrition, Obesity and Physical Activity (NOPA) Posted on June 5, 2011 by Gary D. Price From a WHO Announcement: The NOPA database has been created in close collaboration with health ministries and with support from the European Commission. It includes details on more than 300 national and sub-national policies that address nutrition, physical activity or obesity. Most of these policy documents have been developed in the past six years and refer to lifestyle trends such as the increasing consumption of industrially produced foods high in fat and sugar and declining physical activity. Physical inactivity and poor nutrition are considered to be risk factors to many non-communicable diseases, such as heart diseases and stroke, diabetes, cancer, and mental health disorders. The measurable indicators for policy development have been identified and monitored at the national level in accordance with the commitments made through the European Charter on Counteracting Obesity and the WHO European Action Plan for Food and Nutrition Policy 2007-2012. As an example of these commitments, the Nutrition, Obesity and Physical Activity Database shows that 28 Member States have stated that they plan to take action on physical activity in the school setting, 11 plan to address the adequate labeling of food products and 9 plan to deal with appropriate food marketing practices. Direct to NOPA Database http://infodocket.com/2011/06/05/new-world-health-organization-who-releases-database-on-nutrition-obesity-and-physical-activity-nopa/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Places & Spaces: Mapping Science is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. It has two components: the physical part supports the close inspection of high quality reproductions of maps for display at conferences and education centers; the online counterpart provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of how these maps work. The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014.

By Dan Nguyen Reactions to Osama bin Laden's death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix By Dan Nguyen | Published: May 9, 2011 This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden's death. In the days following the news, the Times asked online readers to not only write their thoughts on bin Laden's killing, but put a mark on a scatterplot graph that best described their reaction. The Times used the data to show the continuum of reactions from everyone who participated. I wanted to see how reactions differed across geographical location and gender. Includes details of his methodology (and a bit on that of the original NYT graphic)

Jonathan Stray of the Associated Press on investigating thousands (or millions) of documents by visualizing clusters. Presentation is from February 2011 at the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting. Visualizations built with multidimensional scaling algorithm Glimmer.

Data Visualization Platform, Weave, Now Open Source Logo Open Source Initiative Image via Wikipedia Civic Commons, Contributors (Karl Fogel, Author) With more and more civic data becoming available and accessible, the challenge grows for policy makers and citizens to leverage that data for better decision-making. It is often difficult to understand context and perform analysis. "Weave", however, helps. A web-based data visualization tool, Weave enables users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from any location at any time. We saw tremendous potential in the platform and have been helping open-source the software, advising on community engagement strategy and licensing. This week, we were excited to see the soft launch of the Weave 1.0 Beta, which went open-source on Wednesday, June 15. Weave is the result of a broad partnership: it was developed by the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research at the University of Massachussetts Lowell, with support from the Open Indicators Consortium, which is made up of over ten municipal, regional, and state member organizations. This consortium will probably expand now that Weave is open source, leading hopefully to greater collaboration, more development, and further innovation on this important platform. Early-adopter data geeks should give it a spin. One of Weave's key features is high-speed interactivity and responsiveness, which is somewhat unusual in web-based visualization software; try out the demo sites or watch the video below. Our congratulations and thanks to the Weave team! As city management is increasingly data-driven, so data analysis and visualization tools will continue to be an important part of every city manager's toolkit. We are excited to see this evolving toolkit enter the civic commons. http://govinthelab.com/data-visualization-platform-weave-now-open-source

Europe's One-Stop Shop on Public Sector Information (PSI) Re-use Working to Stimulate PSI Re-use The aim of the ePSIplatform is to strenghthen community, stimulate action, report developments and monitor progress towards a stronger and more transparent environment for the growth of national and European PSI re-use markets. Interactive One-Stop Shop News about European and International PSI re-use Developments Emerging Good Practices Examples of New PSI Re-use Products and Services Information about Legal cases on PSI Re-use Discussion, Communication and Information Sharing across the European PSI community Expert PSI Community Meetings (two meetings per year) Guest Bloggers from the European PSI Community PSI Topic Reports - Analytical Briefings on PSI Re-use (across sectors and issues) PSI Re-use Resources What is PSI re-use? - background information - the European PSI Re-use Directive translated into 27 EU languages and European Commission Communication on Re-use of PSI Directive (language variants) (May 2009) plus other key links and resources.

A good platform to understand what is happening in the Open Data - Europe movement.

Open Data Cook BookMaking Open Data Accessible for EveryoneAbout the Cook BookThe open data cook book is collecting recipes for ways to find and use open data, particularly open data of social value - such as open government data, or open data for campaigners and charities. Working with data can seem scary. But it doesn't have to be. There are many different ways to make data useful - and lots of different gadgets to help you. Take a look at the growing list of cook book recipes to find simple step by step ideas for making use of open data. RecipesYou can find a list of the recipes so far here. Drafts, ideas and notesIn the cooks notebook you can find draft notes on using different datasets and sketches that might develop into recipes in future. Get InvolvedFind out how to get involved here or jump right in and create a recipe. Tweet with the #opendatacookbook tag, or bookmark content on del.icio.us 'opendatacookbook ' to share with the project. Join the mailing list to discuss developments. UpdateAfter a brief experiment with Drupal as a CMS for the cook book - we've switched to DokuWiki for a bit to make compiling a list of recipes a lot easier before we work out the best way to run the Cook Book.

City of Ottawa moves to formalize open data program http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/city-of-ottawa-moves-to-formalize-open-data-program/143323?sub=569517&utm_source=569517&utm_medium=top5&utm_campaign=TD+

Mapping Sheets Another favorite Google Drive add-on of mine is definitely Mapping Sheets. With this add-on, you can make better use of any geographical data you may have in your spreadsheet. If you've ever wanted an easy way to quickly plot locations from your data onto a Google Map, this is it. drive addons8   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Using it is ridiculously easy. Just make sure you've got a list of addresses and other related data in your sheet, and then trigger this add-on. You'll see a form where you tell it what columns in your sheet to use for creating the map. drive addons9   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Once you submit it, the add-on creates the map right in the sheet for you so that you have a useful visualization of all of that data.

"RegExr is an online tool for editing and testing Regular Expressions (RegExp / RegEx). It provides a simple interface to enter RegEx expressions, and visualize matches in real-time editable source text. It also provides a handy RegExp snippet sidebar with descriptions and usage examples to make it easier to learn Regular Expressions through trial and error. It isn't as powerful as a product like RegExBuddy, but it has the advantage of being online and free. I will be releasing a free desktop version for Mac OSX and Windows built with AIR in the next day or two. So far this has only taken a day of development, and the main app is only 150 lines of code. Flex 3 makes this kind of app so darn simple to put together."