Democratizing Data On A Shoestring Budget
Peter Warden has put together a collection of free, open-source tools that can be used to cull massive amounts of data on essential information such as location. The “Data Science Toolkit” can turn street addresses into coordinates, extract text from PDFs, Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, and various images, filter geographic locations from news articles, and determine political districts based on neighborhood information.
Warden believes the big data revolution will be making these services more affordable and accessible for all. Instead of  overpaying a company for their massive servers to perform these tasks, they can now be done on a budget. Maybe most importantly, his toolkit is a VM (Virtual Machine) “completely isolated operating system installation within your normal operating system” that requires no network connection and has no API limitations.
[via Flowing Data]
| TOPICS: | Electronics & Gadgets, Web & Technology, Work & Business |
| TAGS: | API, data, data science toolkit, Facebook, Future Of Real Time, peter warden, toolkit, virtual machine |
Recent Articles By Tim Ryan 
Tim is a Brooklyn-based writer and regular contributor to PSFK. A graduate of Skidmore College, Tim is currently working in-house at PSFK. Twitter @timjamesryan
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