OpenDataQuiz

As recently mentioned, everybody talks about "opendata". Especially here in Italy, where "to talk" is the preferred activity.

Just for fun I've hacked up a small online quiz game based on informations randomly catched exploring some dataset published on the many (many!) portals endorsed by many different government entities. The platform itself required just some hour of bad and dirty coding (you can find the code here, to laugh about myself), the real issue has been to find something interesting to ask.

On the dozens of available datasets, you have:

• old informations, very few dated back at least to 2014
• local scale potentially interesting informations, often related to minor cities or, when lucky, to specific regions
• incomprensible numbers scattered across a spreadsheet
• and, of course, lots of datasets duplicated in different portals

In the end, after a full day browsing, I had to reduce the number of questions from 10 to 5, cause I had not enough valuable arguments to involve the user.

The goal of the game would been to demostrate how opendata are useful to clearly understand our surrounding world; the effective target has been to demostrate how opendata are, despite the excitement of many, just a far away utopia.

p.s.: the game itself can be found here.