FYI
On June 30, 2015 at 5:42:45 PM, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:
Hey money-followers,
this may be a bit nitty-gritty for the FtM list, but I wanted to share with you the first beta of SpenDB, a reusable, light-weight tool for government financial data.
It’s a radical rewrite of the OpenSpending code base, using modern web technology to make it really simple to upload, manage and explore many types of government financial data: budgets, contract awards, you name it.
What excites me most about it is the integrated query tool that I have started to build. After doing a lot of data journalism training, I’ve realised that most questions against budgets and spending data can be answered with very simple tools - pivot tables, and the odd line chart. With SpenDB, I’m hoping to provide accessible versions of these tools out of the box.
Of course, SpenDB also provides a flexible API that can be used to generate other visualisations and analyses. Instead of rolling my own interface, I’m integrating the “Cubes” toolkit, which means that tools developed for that API will work against SpenDB, and vice versa.
The project is still far from mature, but I’ve decided to push out a first beta version today. For anyone interested, here are some links:
- Blog post: http://pudo.org/blog/2015/06/30/spendb-beta.html
- Demo instance: https://spendb-dev.herokuapp.com/
- SpenDB on GitHub: https://github.com/pudo/spendb
- Cubes: http://cubes.databrewery.org/
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Cheers,
- Friedrich