Mashup fun

Enjoyed learning a bit about transforming XML documents with XSLT in doing some homicide mashup maps for a series of stories reporter Matt Lakin is doing.

He had complied homicide cases since 2000 into two OpenOffice Calc (Excel compatible) spreadsheets. I converted the spreadsheets to XML docs, then “transformed” each XML document into an HTML file and an XML file in Yahoo’s map format using a simple perl program (all my perl programs are simple) and an XSLT stylesheet.

One gotcha I ran into was that the same spreadsheets saved by Excel and OpenOffice produced different XML for the date field and another field with using XML

Excel in perl. I’ll have to look at that some more.

I did run into some issues of things I didn’t know how to do in XSLT stylesheets, but I worked around them and I did have to clean up some addresses in Yahoo..

I used XML and Perl by Mark Riehl and Ilya Sterin to learn how to do this. It’s a good introduction, but you’ll need a book about XSLT if you want to do more than scratch the surface.

The results:

Knoxville homicides

Knox County homicides

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