CAPMAS - the Egyptian statistical agency - releases a wide range of statistics regarding various sectors publicly called Egypt in Figures. So far, they have released:
In the spirit of tools like Mwazna, I hope to do 2 things with Egypt in Figures:
Parse the PDF files to create machine readable (analysable) data files.
Create insightful Data Visualisations
So far I have parsed some files.
I’m also learning D3.js (an online graphic library) and attempting first visualisations. Check here.
How can you contribute
There are three ways:
1. 5 min: Check the work and comment: What could be different? What is not clear? What is missing?
2. 30 min: Logo?
3. 1 hour: Help creating a landing site hosting all the new data files. I am free to different concepts ranging from a simple aggregation to Links (Some style) to full-on portals aka CKAN.
I may be able to help. Not as myself, but because I am the administrator and founder of the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list, by far the most active open data community in the Italian language. We are about 1200 people now, and the mailing list spews out 400-500 messages a month. Our first initiative, back in 2010, was to do exactly what you are doing now: build a national open data website, that at the time was missing (about a year after we had gone live, the Italian government got around to launching http://dati.gov.it.
I am very sure there are “pre-developed” CKAN-integrated sites you can download off some GitHub repo and install. Some of my friends recently swear by DKAN, which is Drupal: so you get the CMS part and the CKAN part in one website. A ready-to-install version of DKAN is here (I have not tried it myself).
What do you need to get started? I might be able to get some help in Italy.
These were working links, I believe they were taken down by now Good thing I created a local copy of the data.
Well that is some fantastic news. Spaghetti open data looks quite cool, perhaps we need our own Egyptian one! Right now I am halfway digitising all the pdf’s, and could need all the future help i can get. Looking forward.
I think I tried Pantheon droplets before (The readymade CKAN linked), they were a bit … weird for me. Anyway
If you give me specific instructions I can put out an email in Italian to the mailing list. We are not new to parsing PDFs; many producers of data make that particular mistake.
@Hegazy, great initiative that someone has started Egypt in Numbers as myself was checking for data for the project we’re working on it but couldn’t find any convenient resources. Anyway, I’d like to introduce Tarek Amr (@gr33ndata), one of the guys behind Mwazna and OpenMENA and Rayna (@MaliciaRouge), is behind OpenMENA. They both can help us for that or there would be some contribution regarding this initiative. PS: I’m somehow, will start contribution with OpenMENA by translating till the moment I finish my Ruby studying