The Smart Chicago Collaborative will host the Chicago location for the PDF Liberation Hackathon 2014 at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust from Saturday, January 18, 2014 from 9AM – 5PM CST and Sunday, January 19, 2014 from 9AM – 1PM CST.
We’re also hosting the Chicago Winter OpenStreetMap #editathon for all day Saturday. Below the fold, we’ve got the details on both of these nationwide events.
- Downtown Chicago crashes on OpenStreetMap, Photo By Steve Vance
PDF Liberation Hackathon
We are hosting the Chicago location for this hackathon dedicated to extracting large volumes of data from PDFs.
Participants can work on a PDF extraction challenge that are being aggregated on the national website for the hackathon, or you can work on your own PDF corpus, or maybe develop enhancements to an open source PDF extraction tool. There are lots of great tools that have been made over the last few years in this area, and this hackathon is an attempt to build on that energy and focus those tools on specific sets of PDFs.
There will be specific challenges posted three days before the hackathon for those who want to get a head start. Examples include government audited financial statements, crime statistics from the New York City Police Department, IRS Forms 990, and House of Representatives Personal Financial Disclosure Forms.
If you have PDFs that you’d like to see liberated, fill out this form and they’ll add it to the list!
Leading up to the event, we’ll be adding to this resource page and will have a demo of Tabula – a popular PDF liberation tool. Smart Chicago Collaborative consultant Christopher Whitaker will be running this event for us here in Chicago.
OpenStreetMap Winter Editathon
OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. For this portion of Saturday, the goal will be to improve OpenStreetMap in Chicago. If you’re new to OpenStreetMap, the Chicago OpenStreepMap community will be on hand to help you get acquainted with OpenStreetMap. We’ll also be posting links and resources on this blog leading up to the event. Ian Dees, OpenStreetMap U.S. board member, will be running this. Hit him up on Twitter with questions.
You can register for the event here.
I forgot about that map… I eventually deleted it from my MapBox/TileMill account because it was just a test for me and that product (I’ve made better things with it now).