OpenDataKit

Hey y'all

I did some research into ODK a couple months ago, its working pretty well out of the box. We didn't connect it to drupal but it seems like it would be possible to pull the data in from the server.

Opendata kit is an open source framework which is based on a server centric model. This model gives us a reliable data quality on the server side. The server interface for defining the forms is slick and flexible,

http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/ - Watch this video to understand what the Open Data Kit can do out of the box. It records user form input which is controlled on the server side, and geo data. You can create any number of forms, and can create conditional forms.

Here's how data types are defined in ODK http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_odk_gettingstarted.html

There are a number of open source servers which we can use as an endpoint for the device data.
From reading the FAQ, looks like there is some work in the community to provide a direct drupal integration.
(ODK FAQ http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/source/browse/FrequentlyAskedQuesti...)

The main server is called ODK Aggregate, from the FAQ link - "ODK Aggregate currently supports passing data to [http://docs.google.com Google Spreadsheets], [http://tables.googlelabs.com/Home?pli=1 Google Fusion Tables] and [http://www.rhizalabs.com/products/insight/overview/ Rhiza Insight]."

An the example app is available
http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/wiki/ODKClinic

Check out the ODK Manage on the android for defining forms from the device.

Happy to help figure this out
-M

Has anyone else been working on this?

I've done some work based on niccolo's post above. I'm using the fetcher (modified to handle media files). I am not using the ODK parser above. I am currently using the XPath parser and a custom after_parse hook to modify any fields mapped to imagefield or taxonomy fields. I'm thinking about creating a parser on top of the XPath parser, specifically for ODK, that is smart enough to automatically convert values based on field types as needed. For example, taxonomy terms are split on spaces into multiple terms for node_save, image and file paths are automatically updated to a full path for filefield/imagefield import.

Any interest? Anyone else having any success?

Hows it going criznach? I'm about to get back into this, have been working on getting data from Cybertracker into drupal, now back after ODK. I'm going to test out Alex's feed parser and see how that goes.

Also does anyone know if you ODK will recored a GPS waypoint set as part of the form? Thinking I might need to write a wrapper for ODK libs to track GPS session data.

I actually contacted this company (WebFirst) a little under a year ago, asking if they would be interested in open sourcing their ODK Drupal module (PhiCollect). The response was "We do not release the source code - we may change the model in the future.".

Jon - please let us know the response if you reach out. If they are open to reconsidering or just discussing the benefits/risks of open source I would be happy to help.

Just finished writing a step by step guide for automatically importing ODK data (collected via the ODK Collect forms on Android) - and importing that data into Drupal, using the Feeds module:

https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/850ec2fdbc78

This provides a bridge between the powerful Android mobile data collection platform and the flexibility of Drupal in processing and building workflows out of that Data.