February 22 is International Open Data Day – Celebrate with our Tutorial or create your own!

Open Data Day Events around the world!

Here at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. we have a lot of fun working with Open Source Software every day. For those who may be interested in sharing the experience, Microsoft is sponsoring several International Open Data Day events over the next few days, notably CodeAcross 2014 in multiple venues worldwide. Have a look here for details on CodeAcross events sponsored by Code for America. In Canada, Make Web Not War is organizing several events in Toronto, and out West, There is also an Open Data Summit in Vancouver. You can also find Open Data Day Hackathons and other events near you by accessing the Open Data Day events map.

An Open Tutorial

To contribute to Open Data Day I’ve put together a tutorial to show you how to enable a solution on Windows Azure that combines three open themes – Open Government, Open Data, and Open Source Software (OSS). The result in this case, is a reference map illustrating the locations of more FAA-licensed aircraft dealers across the United States. For the Open Government piece, I have selected open domain data provided by the US Federal Aviation Administration - the FAA Aircraft Registry. I have chosen to use the open source MongoDB to store data. I use the Open Data Protocol (OData) via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in Windows Azure to provide easy connectivity to the MongoDB data, and I use Microsoft PowerBI for Office365 to easily plot and visualize the data on a map.

Here’s a screen shot of the finished product:

Happy Open Data Day! Let us know how you plan to celebrate the occasion in your corner of the world.