A few weeks ago, in September, the Open Knowledge Festival brought together a world-wide community of people working on all sorts of "open": open cities, open design, open government, open science, open hardware, open education, ... and of course: open development.
As one of the main topic streams, the open development track was packed with presentations, discussions, panels, workshops and a hackathon.
Earlier this year, I was approached by Michiel Kuijper, who was working on his Bachelor degree at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and was looking for a project to combine Business Intelligence and text mining. Together, we started exploring how to apply this in the development aid sector.
In development aid, more and more information on aid activities is becoming available as structured data published according to the IATI standard. At the same time, a lot of mostly unstructured information is available in documents. We wanted to bring these two together.
From a business case perspective: how can a "business intelligence" approach help in data processing and analysis, based on performance indicators.
From a technical perspective: how can we deal with the large variety and volume of the data and documents.
From an information perspective: how can we combine a variety of structured and unstructured information for various purposes.
Michiel has put all of this together in a proof of concept "platform for business intelligence" based on CouchDB, using OpenCalais to annotate documents and with a front-end based on Exhibit and Simile.
