Working with Budgets and Spending Data

Curriculum

4 Sections
20 Lessons
Lifetime

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Categorization and reference data
Need to put your data on a map but it doesn't contain Latitude and Longitude values? Read on!
5
Choosing an audience and classifying your data
Sometimes you will need to classify your financial data, for example, to reflect services that people care about or to conform to internationally recognised standards.
5
What is the difference between budgets and spending?
Before we begin working with the data, let's take a closer look at the difference between budgets and spending data - what questions is it possible to answer with this data?
7
Cleaning spending data
A quick introduction to why spending data often needs cleaning, following into a recipe for cleaning spending data with Open Refine.
3

Geographic identifiers

Geographic identifiers are used to describe administrative boundaries or specific locations identified in a dataset. While some regional classifications (such as the EU NUTS) are released on the web, there is also an increasing number of open databases which contain geographic names – including geonames.org and the recently developed world.db.

Another related technique is the process of reverse geo-coding: translating a human-readable address into a pair of coordinates. Services like nominatim (http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/) will not only enable users to generate precise maps of projects in a region, they will also return the responsible administrative boundary for many coordinates. This means that projects which are given by precise address can also be aggregated by state, region or any other geographic unit.

Additionally, many countries have shapefiles of their political and geographic districts available (usually through the census or interior bureaus) that can be imported into custom mapping applications, like TileMill (http://mapbox.com/tilemill/).

Classification reference data

Working with Budgets and Spending Data

Curriculum

Geographic identifiers

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