(g)rumbles reveal the bias

[Daniel Haran]

Hi folks,

A couple week-ends ago I participated in Rails Rumble, a competition
to build a web service in 48 hours. My application
(whatdoesthiserrormean.com) is probably not of interest to most on
this list, but this one might:

http://revealthebias.r08.railsrumble.com/

Note too that of all the entries
http://www.railsrumble.com/entries

There is one that a friend of mine wanted to do for Canada:
http://riverdex.r08.railsrumble.com/

He's still waiting for government to provide the data. So, once again
a US company gets a head start in a market.

Cheers,

Daniel.

[Jennifer Bell]

> There is one that a friend of mine wanted to do for Canada:
> http://riverdex.r08.railsrumble.com/

Neat.  Do you know: what graphing package was used to do the river hydrographs?

Jennifer


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[Daniel Haran]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Jennifer Bell <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>> There is one that a friend of mine wanted to do for Canada:
>> http://riverdex.r08.railsrumble.com/
>
> Neat.  Do you know: what graphing package was used to do the river hydrographs?
>
> Jennifer

All the teams had to list resources:
http://www.railsrumble.com/teams/new-media-logic lists Ziya and
XML/SWF Charts :)

d.

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Has there been research done to see if this is being done in Canada?  Geogratis has the Hydrographic file for free - River Keepers  and the Water Alliance of Canada may be interested this sorta product.

It would be awesome to have flow data, but also water quality, associations who are river stewards, historical data etc.  that could be user generated.

Yes the US does this sorta thing first, as the tourist industry with a critical mass of tourists who roam the rivers and among that much larger number there is more money in the pool and a higher incentive to create such a tool! 

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Daniel Haran <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Jennifer Bell <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>> There is one that a friend of mine wanted to do for Canada:
>> http://riverdex.r08.railsrumble.com/
>
> Neat.  Do you know: what graphing package was used to do the river hydrographs?
>
> Jennifer

All the teams had to list resources:
http://www.railsrumble.com/teams/new-media-logic lists Ziya and
XML/SWF Charts :)

d.

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--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

[Daniel Haran]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> Has there been research done to see if this is being done in Canada?
> Geogratis has the Hydrographic file for free - River Keepers  and the Water
> Alliance of Canada may be interested this sorta product.
>
> It would be awesome to have flow data, but also water quality, associations
> who are river stewards, historical data etc.  that could be user generated.
>
> Yes the US does this sorta thing first, as the tourist industry with a
> critical mass of tourists who roam the rivers and among that much larger
> number there is more money in the pool and a higher incentive to create such
> a tool!

The data is available here:
http://scitech.pyr.ec.gc.ca/waterweb/hydroPortfolio.asp

The format is such it would take at least a couple days to figure out
scraping, and it would be brittle and error-prone. It's been 6+ months
now that they've been contacted and agreed in principle to offer the
data.

Riverdex was built in 48 hours. So it would take us longer to grab the
data than to build a site that used it.

Maybe it would be faster if a few of us geeks just specified the
format. First on my list would be a simple HTML micro-format for
Hansard :)

d.