The Erie County (NY) Comptroller recently launched a site that lists some of the accounts payable transactions for the county (http://www2.erie.gov/comptroller/index.php?q=taxpayer-checkbook). This data is of limited utility due to lack of context (the only information available is the payee, the amount and the date) and the format in which it was released (a set of PDF files). While little can be done to provide context, we can at least address the data format issues.
This project has a single component:
- scraper - a utility that uses the DataSponge project to crawl the Erie County Comptroller website in order to convert the individual PDF files into a single CSV file that can then be imported into eeither a database or a spreadsheet for analysis.
The output.csv file is a sample of what is generated by this project. It consists of all data available as of Feb 23, 2015.
###TODO
- implement a simple UI for searching the data
- API