For those not familiar with Young Rewired State it is an organization committed to bring coding to the youth of today. YRS has successfully been running for 5 years and continues to grow. This weekend in the first YRS event in NY. A call for help was made and we now have some great mentors to help at the event.
The attendees at this weekends event in New York City are being encouraged to create ideas and applications around open government data sets. Given that the event is in New York why not make use of the open NY data. Who would not want to create an application around "Rat sightings" or "Real Time Traffic Speed".
New York along with many other states and the Federal Governemnt provide a mountain of accessible open data. This gives everyone a myriad of options for mashing up data.
The Open Data is available both as a download option in lots of formats or also via an API (http://dev.socrata.com/consumers/getting-started/).
We are also giving the students an access to a SAP HANA system on AWS to store and access existing data sets such as toxic releases, registered child care and fishing rivers in NYC. The datasets are accessible via OData (or server side Javascript). This not only provides simple access to the information via OData but also the option to upload large datasets and improve query performance significantly. This is very usefull when using some of the Federal open data that can take 15 minutes to query, not exactly optimal for a mobile applications, or one that really fits into a 6 minute demo.
Help will be on hand for the attendees to add extra data sets to the HANA database and also implement the client side consumption of the data.
The event saw a surge in interest this week when Stephen Fry tweeted about the event. We are looking forward to a fun techie filled weekend, my car will be packed with Raspberry Pi, Lego Mindstorms and various tablets to play with and somehow connect to the data available.
Hopefully there will be some exciting moments to blog about at the event too!
For anyone at the event that wants some help installing a data set on HANA, reading the Data on a web page, mobile device or robot, I am pretty recognizable with my shiny head and #14 shirt, but you can also send a tweet to @johna69 or @sapdevs, post a comment on this blog and I'll come running :smile:
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