huge archive of telephone company rates and revenues...in Lotus .wk3 and .wk4 format

[Douglas Galbi <purplemotes purplemotes net>]

U.S. telephone companies publicly file tariff data at the U.S. Federal 
Communications Commission (FCC).  I've compiled an archive of these 
filings for all the larger U.S. local telephone companies and many 
others.  A major limit on broad public review of these public data is 
that all the data are in Lotus 1-2-3 .wk3 and .wk4 format.  Gnumeric and 
other widely used spreadsheets can't read this type of Lotus file. 

The Gnumeric project has called for help in writing import filters.  
Perhaps most programmers don't find writing import filters to be 
exciting work.  But making some important, public telephone company data 
more publicly accessible is exciting work.  It would also be an 
important contribution to supporting the existence of communication 
services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.

The telephone company archive consists of about 5000 Lotus 1-2-3 .wk3 
and .wk4 files.  For more description and links to the archive, see
http://purplemotes.net/2009/08/09/mountains-of-telecom-data-for-crowd-fun/

Some useful tasks:

1.  Convert all 5000 Lotus .wk3 and .wk4 spreadsheets to an open 
spreadsheet format that gnumeric and other free spreadsheets could 
read.  The Lotus spreadsheets include macros and formulas.  But 
conversion of just the data, without any other conversion effort, would 
be a major contribution.

2.  Combine the TRP spreadsheets and the rate-detail spreadsheets into 
two separate, non-proprietary-format datasets of records indexed by 
company name and filing date.  The TRPs have a standard format that 
would make doing this relatively easy.  Records for the rate-detail 
spreadsheets could just use file name and file date, with  rows of 
spreadsheets being records and columns defining fields (a more 
semantically sensitive organization of fields would be even better).

Summary of the problem: the general public can't easily read telephone 
company data in Lotus 1-2-3 .wk3 and .wk4.  With some help from 
public-spirited programmers, the public can get much better access to 
these public data.  That means more knowledge to organize efforts to 
secure adequate communications services at reasonable rates.

Douglas Galbi
purplemotes purplemotes net