FREE Open Data Master Classes

The past few months have seen a number of high profile announcements on the
release of central and local government data for free. The Prime Minister
launched the data.gov.uk portal to ‘open up data and promote transparency’
and the London Mayor announced the London Data Store to ‘give Londoners the
change to find out more about how the city is run’. There is great
excitement in the developer community and many new mash-ups and apps have
been produced from the released data already.

The Horizon Digital Economy Research and the Centre for Geospatial Science
at the University of Nottingham in partnership with data.gov.uk and
GeoVation is proud to announce a series of FREE one-day Open Data Master
Classes to reach a wide cross section of people (i.e., individuals,
communities, grassroots organizations, NGOs to civil servants and
professionals) who can benefit from a greater understanding of the
opportunities around open data. Specifically, the one-day master class will
provide individuals with the tools and techniques needed to use and analysis
a range of Open Datasets that are of relevance and interest to them such as,
for example, school census data, health care provision, crime statistics and
transportation data.

The Open Data Master Classes combine theory and practicals with guest
lectures from prominent members in the field from government, academia and
business. The Master Classes will provide participants the opportunity to
use and harness Open Datasets from various government departments and public
sector organizations including Higher Education, Health Care, Transport and
Environment – and in doing so, participants will learn a range of techniques
from data collection and processing to data analysis and map visualization.
The content of the Master Classes is suitable for a wider spectrum of
participants with various levels of IT experience, although some familiarity
with web browsing and Microsoft Excel is assumed.

The Open Data Master Classes series starts in November at the University of
Newcastle (8th Nov) before moving on to University College London (10th
Nov), Nottingham University (12th Nov), University of Aberdeen (17th Nov),
Royal Geographical Society London (18th Nov) and University of Southampton
(3rd Dec). We will be able to offer each master class to 30-40 participants.
We have secured use of purpose built facilitates within each university
including state-of-the-art lecture theatres and computer rooms.

To register visit http://bit.ly/opendataMC or for further information
contact Dr. Hanif Rahemtulla at hanif.rahemtulla@nottingham.ac.uk