Sessions at OSCON 2012 about Data on Thursday 19th July

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• Digging into Open Data

  by Kim Rees

  Data, data everywhere, but not a structured bit. Open data is all the rage, but often this data is poorly formatted or not very accessible. This session will discuss various ways to pry open the oyster of public data.

  • Data
  • open
  • public

  At 10:40am to 11:20am, Thursday 19th July

  In Portland 252, Oregon Convention Center

• Designing effective visualisations: matching data problems to our perceptual strengths

  by Hadley Wickham

  To design and critique visualisations you need to know a little bit about how the brain works. This talk will give you the basics of perception as it applies to visualisation.

  I’ll cover four main principles:

  • Match perceptual and data topology
  • Make important comparisons easy
  • Visual connections should reflect real connections
  • Beware of animation!

  Each topic will be illustrated with real examples from around the web, and you’ll be able to put the principles to work right away in your own visualisations.

  I’ll also show some optical illusions, cases where our visual system fails us, and show how some common visualisation techniques can be extremely misleading.

  • Cognition
  • Data
  • Psychology
  • visualisation

  At 11:30am to 12:10pm, Thursday 19th July

  In D137, Oregon Convention Center

• ElasticSearch, Your New Best Friend

  by Harold Hannon

  So you have a ton of data that you need to search efficiently. How do you do it? Make friends with search. Index and search solutions can provide distinct advantages over traditional RDBMS systems for storing and querying large data sets. Learn how to leverage elasticsearch, an open source search solution, for fast and painless indexing and querying of data.

  • Data
  • ElasticSearch
  • RDBMS

  At 11:30am to 12:10pm, Thursday 19th July

  In E142, Oregon Convention Center

• Google Government Public Data: Finding and delivering the world’s government, tabular data

  by Christopher Swenson

  The web consists of free-form links, and Google has excelled at quickly searching through this information. But, finding structured data, such as databases, spreadsheets, and tables is hard: they contain few links into and out of these documents. This talk discusses some of our efforts to find and present this data (focusing on government-generated), making it universally accessible and useful.

  • Data
  • Google
  • Government
  • public

  At 11:30am to 12:10pm, Thursday 19th July

  In Portland 252, Oregon Convention Center

• US Government v. Open Source: A History and Lessons Learned

  by Karl Fogel and Gunnar Hellekson

  We've assembled the first comprehensive history of open source in the US government -- all the major events, publications, policy, and code releases we could collect. And it's mashable. From that data, we learn how the government adopts open source, how policies affects adoption, and how governments have most effectively encouraged their own open source use.

  • Adoption
  • Data
  • Government
  • Open Source

  At 11:30am to 12:10pm, Thursday 19th July

  In E145, Oregon Convention Center

• Analyzing How Developers Learn Online For Fun and Profit

  by Keith Fahlgren

  Modern developers use an ever-expanding set of online tools to help them solve problems, develop skills, and get their work done. Analyzing the usage data from one of these tools reveals a surprising amount about emerging technologies and how some developers are learning more effectively.

  • Data
  • Emerging technologies
  • Learning
  • Tools

  At 4:10pm to 4:50pm, Thursday 19th July

  In Portland 256, Oregon Convention Center