[GTALUG] Myles's Open Data Talk

Great talk from Myles tonight. Canada is trying to be better about open data, but it has a long way to go. There are open PDF scraping tools, but they tend to be very limited in domain. It's always fun when you get data that must be published, but there's no stipulation that it's usable. The best example of this is the US Armed Forces Appropriations data that's published in a single giant PDF every year. While it genuinely does publish details of every military contract, it uses a fiendish set of page templates to make it very difficult to parse. I ended up making minor headway consider each page as geodata, with each page a map with words at given coordinates. Cheers Stewart