France starts opening its data

http://www.data.gouv.fr/

by geoffroy • 15 years ago

111 12 15 years ago

data.gouv.fr

pefavre• 15 years ago

Good news, for once french gov shows the way.

GiraffeNecktie• 15 years ago

Or maybe just follows the pack. US, UK, Canada and others have been doing this for a while.

Ecio78• 15 years ago

Italy is doing the same but as usual, too late and too slow: http://www.dati.gov.it/

tonfa• 15 years ago

It is a step in the good direction, but there are still too many datasets where the best available version under an open licence is from the US (that's often the case for french geographical data).

nakkiel• 15 years ago

Well, the US is actually the exception regarding GIS data; not France.

_delirium2• 15 years ago

This is a lot more data than I expected for a launch! I guess they wanted to get a lot of stuff organized before going public with it. Looks like some useful data that wasn't previously publicly available (or available under a free-enough license), from some brief skimming. There's some discussion on the French OpenStreetMap list about using it in semi-automated fashion to improve French coverage on OSM, especially for things like landmarks and landforms outside of the major cities, or adding metadata to existing landmark nodes.

brohee• 15 years ago

It's a goldmine, there are 350k datasets available, and a lot of them that will not make some people happy (criminality by geographic zone for example).

It opens possibilities to create a really nice multi-factor (e.g. crime, pollution, education) "best place to live" application.

A lot of the data is available in a very manageable CSV, sadly some is only available in XLS that may be a bit harder to manipulate programmaticaly.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

For the ones that aren't formatted randomly in Excel:

library(RODBC)

channel <- odbcConnectExcel("myExcelFile.xls")

myDataFrame <- sqlFetch(channel, "Sheet1")

odbcCloseAll()

write.csv(

   file = paste("myExcelFile", "Sheet1.csv"),

   myDataFrame,

   row.names = F

)

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

For XLS, be sure to check out Roo http://roo.rubyforge.org/ or use Java libraries and JRuby.

BasDirks• 15 years ago

for a pretty good python library:

pip install xlrd

czzarr• 15 years ago

it's a step in the right direction but why isn't there an API ? seriously

France starts opening its data

Related Stories