project:openletten

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Letten is a place at the Limmat river right behind the ZHdK building (where MakeOpenData is hosted) in Zürich.

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Photo by Yago Veith www.yago1.com used under (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The project idea is described here:

http://makeopendata.ch/forum/discussion/5/physical-mashup-of-a-multicolor-led-and-the-current-water-temperature-at-letten-environmental-data

The aim of OpenLetten is to show how hard it is to parse data if the publisher choses to only support the human readable data format (here PDF ), and how easy it becomes to build novel visualisations and mashups once the data is also published in an open, machine readable data format (e.g. CSV or RSS ).

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Once the data is available in an open format it's quite easy to display it in away that suits the consumer rather than the publisher of the data. While the original PDF contains a lot more information, the current temperature is what's most interesting if you're about to decide if you should go for a swim. There is no way for the government to cater to such needs as they might be very special or of concern to a small minority only. Data in an open format empowers such groups to take action themselves and use the data they paid for with tax money in a way that serves them well.

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  • http://try.yaler.net/~arduino/led (Arduino LED with a REST interface, LED color set by HTTP PUT request from LettenLedMashup.exe, sorry for the ads, 504 if offline)

Back to project overview: http://makeopendata.ch/doku.php?do=search&id=@project

  • project/openletten.1317474015.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2012/03/06 00:00
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