

France starts opening its data - geoffroy
http://www.data.gouv.fr/

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brohee
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
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
    
    )

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_delirium
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.

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pefavre
Good news, for once french gov shows the way.

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

~~~
Ecio78
Italy is doing the same but as usual, too late and too slow:
<http://www.dati.gov.it/>

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

