Darren Barnes: ONS Databaker: from 'pretty spreadsheets' to useful CSVs
Channel: csvconf
Date: 2016-11-16

Out of the last CSV Conf, the Office for National Statistics hooked up with Scraper Wiki to produce a tool for more easily converting the traditional and all too common 'pretty spread sheet' into a much more open, machine readable and usable CSV format. This tool is called DataBaker and is freely available on GitHub. The tool is effectively a wrapper for the useful XYPath Python package also produced by Scraper Wiki and Data Baker allows easy creation of recipes to extract data from spreadsheets in a robust and flexible way. This talk will give a brief overview of the tool, how we use it at the ONS and how we see it moving forward (adding Linked Data URIs to the output fields?). We hope to engage community interest for adapting this tool for even wider us