For my studies at the university our group had to focus on writing a paper about certain application scenarios for knowledge management. We picked a kind-of data mining approach: Vienna’s Open Government Data website is full of useful information. You can find data freely available to the public on their website providing you with essential information about the city, such as planned streets but also the whole public transport system. We isolated a more unusual data source: the stock of trees of Vienna.

Could that file be of any use to an individual? What could be certain application scenarios? Who’d benefit from a boring list containing only infos about trees? In our opinion, more people than you might think. We used R to dig into the dataset and to analyze it.

In addition, we created a Screencast giving you essential information on how to deal with such datasets and R. This might be an interesting tutorial if you never used this formidable tool.

Kudos to my colleagues who helped writing this paper.