Handle external data sources in Drupal using TheDataTank
Need to integrate, combine and visualize Open data on your drupal website in a consistent and sustainable way? Check out The DataTank.
Coming from the land of drupal, the Datatank is another Belgian invention that will change the way we handle (open) data sources on the web. What drupal is for user generated content, is what the Datatank is for computer generated content.
The DataTank is an open source RESTful data publishing platform. It utilizes the HTTP protocol to identify datasources and provide an instant API on top of them. It aims at taking away the step developers have to take to utilize datafiles on various dataportals so that open data can be more easily turned into knowledge and information.
In human-terms : It translates data scraped from HTML pages, CSV files, google Spreadsheets, SQL database and various webservices protocols like soap, rest and plain xml and offers them to your drupal site in a consistent RESTful way. As such it allows developers to concentrate on doing cool stuff with data instead of fighting against all kinds off different data sources.
Furthermore, it provides a framework to create semantic data out of various datafiles and load them into a triplestore, allowing you to achieve the ultimate goal of earning the fifth star of open data by Tim Berners-Lee.
The current drupal module, https://drupal.org/project/tdt, allows pushing data sets to a drupal front end. In more general terms, this talk is aimed at drupal developers with knowledge of RESTful services, since any project working with external data sources will need custom code for integration.
