Frictionless Data Tool Fund update: Shelby Switzer and Greg Bloom, Open Referral
Lilly Winfree - January 15, 2020 in Data Package, Frictionless Data, Open Knowledge


Example of a demo app consuming the API generated from the HSDS Zip
The Open Referral team has also been working on projects related to the HSDS Transformer and HSDS Zip. For example, the HSDS Validator checks that a given datapackage of community service data is HSDS-compliant. Additionally, they have used these tools in the field with a project in Miami. For this project, the HSDS Transformer was used to transform data from a Microsoft SQL Server into an HSDS Zip. Then that zipped datapackage was used to populate a Human Services Data API with a generated developer portal and OpenAPI Specification. Further, as part of this work, the team also contributed to the original source code for the datapackage-rb Ruby gem. They added a new feature to infer a datapackage.json schema from a given set of CSVs, so that you can generate the json file automatically from your dataset. Greg and Shelby are eager for the Open Referral community to use these new tools and provide feedback. To use these tools currently, users should either be a Ruby developer who can use the gem as part of another Ruby project, or be familiar enough with Docker and HTTP APIs to start a Docker container and make an HTTP request to it. You can use the HSDS Transformer as a Ruby gem in another project or as a standalone API. In the future, the project might expand to include hosting the HSDS Transformer as a cloud service that anyone can use to transform their data, eliminating many of these technical requirements. Interested in using these new tools? Open Referral wants to hear your feedback. For example, would it be useful to develop an extract-transform-load API, hosted in the cloud, that enables recurring transformation of nonstandardised human service directory data source into an HSDS-compliant datapackage? You can reach them via their GitHub repos. Further reading: openreferral.org Repository: https://github.com/openreferral/hsds-transformer HSDS Transformer: https://openreferral.github.io/hsds-transformer/