I’m not a system administrator, I’m a consultant and a developer. However, in order to put my ideas in practice and show the world that they work, I had to be able to set up fully working prototypes. I rented a server and started to deploy applications the same way I did for development on my PC.
Read moreAll posts by Colin Maudry
Resources published on data.gouv.fr… but unavailable
I have used data.gouv.fr RDF metadata and an home made script to check the availability* of all the resources (files) published or simply referenced on http://data.gouv.fr. Indeed, the French open data portal offers the possibility to reference data published in one’s own premises. This script also gets the server response time for each resource.
Read morecsvtool manual page
I just discovered csvtool, a command line utility that I found in default Xubuntu package repository, as I was looking for other utilities (namely csvsort, csvstat, csvcut and co.). I wanted to scream my joy but couldn’t find the manual online. Only when running csvtool --help. It’s not on Ubuntu website.
From datasets to linked datasets in open government data
Helping the machines to understand what the data means, so that they can help us search and cross the data published by our governments.
Initially published on Medium on September 14th, 2014. I’ve replaced some links with more accessible sources (i.e. not hardcore standard specifications) and I’ve also rephrased the last sections to make them more accessible.
Summary (tl;dr;): Publishing open government data dissipates the mist around the business of the State and its tentacles, and enriches the dialogue between the administration and the citizens. However, today, this data is usually not described with machine-readable semantics, which makes it hard to perform large scale search and create value by crossing datasets together.
The Semantic Web technologies come to the rescue: they enable the creation of worldwide identifiers for concepts (the URIs), definitions with machine-readable semantics and data storage and querying as a graph. The result is a standard and semantics-driven open data platform.
Read morecURL examples to query Wikidata
Let’s clarify XSLT template priority rules
In the frame of the preparation of a DITA Open Toolkit course, I have to explain how template priority rules work in XSLT. Before preparing this course, I had a vague idea of how it worked. I knew how import precedence worked, but for templates located in the same file, I didn’t really know which @match patterns had priority over others. I just fixed the conflicts when they popped up.