Expense Visualizer
In Development
Visualizer for Travel and Hospitality expenses scraped from federal government websites.As the result of a federal government directive, Travel and Hospitality Expenses have been published on the web in Canada since 2004. This information is currently spread across 124 different department sites, all publishing the data in subtly different formats. This project scrapes these expenses from the federal websites into a common format, so that this data can be supplied via an API to external tools and projects interested in using this information.
VisibleGovernment.ca engaged ffunction, a Montreal data visualization firm, to produce a web visualization tool to allow users to:
- compare expenses by department
- compare expenses by individual
- compare expenses by time period
To get involved, join the Google Group for this project.
2010/09/13 Update: ffunction announced the launch of their visualization prototype using data VisibleGovernment volunteers collected in 2009 from 40 government departments. The partial data set of 26,000 records has a number of omissions due to scraping failures, as well as errors that were present in the original data.
VisibleGovernment's data set is available for public download as SQL. Each expense record collected contains a link back to the original government website it was scraped from in 2009. Note that, due to the changeable nature of government websites, some of these links may no longer be valid.