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Monday, September 15, 2008

An application of Open Economics

Rufus Pollock, Some Agricultural History via Open Economics, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, September 15, 2008.

One of the active Open Knowledge Foundation projects is Open Economics. A substantial part of that effort ends up being data acquisition and ‘cleaning’: getting hold of economic data, parsing it into (computer) usable form and adding it to the Store. ...

Once this job is done, the data is there in a nice clean state for others to use — plus we can draw some nice graphs (as we will see below). As an illustration of this process, we’ll look at one particular dataset acquired earlier this year when, motivated by the large increases in commodity prices and the concerns expressed regarding their impact, I decided to see what data I could dig up on food prices (starting with Wheat).

As usual, it was US government material that was most easily available (in a decent format) and I decided to start off with historical information on wheat to be found in the Wheat Yearbook, in particular [this].

While the data was available (and open — since US Govt provided) it was in a format that was not immediately computer usable (lots of blank lines etc). Thus, the first step was to parse this into standard csv file format (see script here) and then upload this to Open Economics. The result.

Not only do we now have nice clean data but, thanks to plotkit, Open Economics has javascript graphing so without any more effort we can automatically have graphs of the resulting material. ...