[TriZPUG] Open Data and Last Night's Project Night

[Chris Calloway]

Kurt and Barry: 
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/learning-to-code-may-be-enough-if-it-happens/

I thoroughly enjoyed last night's project night even though I once again 
didn't finish my project.

But today I had a weird coincidence related to last night's project 
night after-meeting (thanks, James Whisnant, for saying the magic 
b-word). Eric Leary, you will really appreciate this:

Today I participated in a four-hour OSGeo webinar for this open source 
project:

http://pycsw.org/

(Jim White, isn't this the project you gave a lightning talk about? Or 
rather, this project is a dependency of the project you talked about?)

It's basically a Python server that will harvest metadata from properly 
formed geo-spatial data web services like WMS and create geo-searchable 
data catalogs from that metadata through yet another web service called 
CWS. Pipelines of web services. Boring for you maybe. But in my line of 
work of trying to make big piles of geo-spatial data easily searchable, 
it's exciting stuff. It makes use of the Shapely package written by 
geo-python guru Sean Gillies, who has been to the Triangle a few times. 
And it's getting integrated with my favorite Python package, pydap, 
where it will be able to do auto-discovery, the holy grail of metadata 
management.

At the end of the webinar, we were pointed at a page for community 
involvement in the project:

http://pycsw.org/community.html

It's a pretty new project. So not a lot of users yet. But new users are 
coming online pretty fast and I'll be another datum on that map soon 
enough. I noticed on the map an icon that looked like it was on top of 
North Carolina. So I clicked on it and it took me to the data catalog 
service for "Open Data Durham:"

http://opendatadurham.org/

Amusingly, it's a catalog service with no data cataloged, sort of cart 
before horse. But I was impressed that someone hereabouts was running 
pycws for any purpose and also was kind of spooked that it was for an 
Open Data movement site like we talked about just last night.

Then down at the bottom of the site, there was a link for "Created by 
Triangle Code for America." I clicked on that link and was taken to a G+ 
page where most of the posts were by the Red Hat guy we were talking 
about last night in connection with the local Open Data movement. My 
head starting vibrating like this is too coincidental.

But there were also posts and comments on that page by some TriPython 
folks like Colin Copeland and Jason Hare. You guys will have to share 
more about what you've been doing. I think we may want to invite Jason 
Hibbets to come talk to us as well. Whaddya think, Eric?

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway http://nccoos.org/Members/cbc
office: 3313 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599