As the Open Data NI portal is having a relaunch this morning (a bit early for anyone outside of Belfast to get to if you don’t mind me saying). That said, here’s a quick recap of the posts I’ve previously done with the data available.

• Translink Railway Stations as Neo4J Nodes
• NI Assembly Data with Spark and Clojure Part 1
• NI Assembly Data with Spark and Clojure Part 2
• NI Prescription Data with Spark and Clojure Part 1
• NI Prescription Data with Spark and Clojure Part 2
• Creating St Vincent Lyrics and NI Assembly Questions with Markov Chains.

All the code is open sourced so you can play with it and mess around as much as you want.

My thoughts are this. You can have all the suits in the room you want, if the community isn’t buying into it then all open data initiatives are wasted. It’s about empowering the people to make discoveries themselves.

I wish the portal all the best.