Extracting Insights from FBO.Gov data – Part 1
Extracting Insights from FBO.Gov data – Part 2
Extracting Insights from FBO.Gov data – Part 3
Dave Fauth has written a great three part series on extracting “insights” from large amounts of data.
From the third post in the series:
Earlier this year, Sunlight foundation filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit requested solication and award notices from FBO.gov. In November, Sunlight received over a decade’s worth of information and posted the information on-line for public downloading. I want to say a big thanks to Ginger McCall and Kaitlin Devine for the work that went into making this data available.
In the first part of this series, I looked at the data and munged the data into a workable set. Once I had the data in a workable set, I created some heatmap charts of the data looking at agencies and who they awarded contracts to. In part two of this series, I created some bubble charts looking at awards by Agency and also the most popular Awardees.
In the third part of the series, I am going to look at awards by date and then displaying that information in a calendar view. Then we will look at the types of awards.
For the date analysis, we are going to use all of the data going back to 2000. We have six data files that we will join together, filter on the ‘Notice Type’ field, and then calculate the counts by date for the awards. The goal is to see when awards are being made.
The most compelling lesson from this series is that data doesn’t always easily give up its secrets.
If you make it to the end of the series, you will find the government, on occasion, does the right thing. I’ll admit it, I was very surprised. 😉