Don’t know your API from your Shipping? – We’re pleased to present to you… the Bath: Hacked Glossary!
We’ve had people of varied experience in the technical world show interest in Bath: Hacked recently and decided that one way of breaking down the barriers to get people involved was to describe many of the basic terms that the organisation uses.
Terminology to help you navigate the Bath: Hacked website:
| Analytics | The process of deriving meaningful patterns within data. |
| API | Application Programme Interface; a way to get things in or out of someone elses software e.g Twitter API lets you tweet or read timelines. |
| B&NES | Bath and North East Somerset (council) |
| Big Data | The massive amount of data that has become available to us because of the rise of online traffic and the sheer amount of data now available which requires analytics packages to understand / make something useful from the data accrued. |
| Data | Information gathered on a defined topic. |
| Data Cleansing | This is the process of cleaning up your data – detecting and removing inaccurate records from your database. i.e. removing incorrect, incomplete, duplicated or out of date data. |
| Data Quality | This is a gauge of the reliability of your data; whether it is accurate, complete, up-to-date and accessible. |
| Data Store | A place to store and provide easy access to datasets. |
| Data Visualisation | How dry-bones data comes to life in a captivating, image-based and occasionally shareable way. |
| Dataset | A big old pile of information or stats, normally rows or columns. |
| Github | A Git repository web-based hosting service. It is an open source store for library of code, working processes and demonstration of work. |
| Hack | A no rules environment for problem solving. |
| Hackathon | An event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming hacking. |
| License | Documentation that tells you whether there are any specific things you can’t do with the data, or whether you need to credit someone else if you use it. It is good to say ‘thanks’ to the data provider |
| Open Data | Information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. |
| Open Government License | A copyright license for Crown Copyright works published by the UK government, data published under the open government license can be used for any purpose; but don’t forget to attribute the source |
| Open Source | Open to public participation, as in the sharing of information or the development of software. Open source programs are those whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. |
| Shipped | The terminology used to indicate that your application/project is ready for the public to use. |
| Socrata | The management platform for the data sets; offers citizens a way to review, compare, visualise and analyse data and share discoveries in real time. |