Have you ever needed data for a work or academic project? If so, are there any good sites on the internet where you can easily access data? I have had to complete several projects at work where I had to build reports in various BI tool (Qlik and PowerBI). I needed to...
Kia ora koutou, This month we have a spotlight on Open Source, our team are passionate about open - Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source. I first worked on an Open Source Linux kernel back in 1989 (showing my age) so have enjoyed watching this space mature and...
If my reading is in any way accurate (my own version of sample preparation bias) there are nearly 200 varieties of bias. What does this say about our decisions made so far? Cognitive bias tricks people into spending money now rather than saving for the unknown...
OptimalBI is big on Open Data. Over the years we have written a lot of blogs on Open Data. Sarah from our team has been working with the Data Futures Partnership on the Data Commons Catalyst project which will provide a data sharing ecosystem for New Zealand. If you...
In the spring of 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony fell victim to a wave of murderous public hysteria that claimed the lives of twenty-five people. It wasn’t until after the Salem Village doctor had already diagnosed the ‘bewitchment’ of two young girls who had been...
My love of the Open Data Institute (ODI) expanded recently when I learned they have released a new Open Data Maturity Model tool - thanks Paul Stone. I have written before about the importance of the Open Data Institute in What do President Obama, the inventor of the...
My recent challenges have been getting spatial data in an open format. Statistics NZ was my source for information but on their official website the data I wanted was only available in ESRI and MapInfo formats. Open data in propriety formats seems counter intuitive....
As I mentioned in my last post we have loaded the KML into Qlik Sense but it's not that useful as the Name field is missing and being populated with an automatically generated value p<rownumber>. If you open the KML file in a text editor you will see that for...
One of the features of Qlik Sense is the ability to load your own mapping layers into the tool. This allows you to navigate your data spatially and provides another visualisation to display represented data that might have a geographic aspect. All Qlik needs is a...
One of the pieces of data we use regularly is dates. Every data repository needs the ability to view the data by day, month, year, etc. There is often also a need to view data based on holidays. Funnily enough, you would think that a list of data containing the NZ...