Tag: opendata

AJAX and automation

For these 2 reasons — the transparency of the HTTP pipeline, and the accessibility of the JavaScript object model — I think that AJAX is inherently more automatable than conventional GUI apps ever have been.

the view source qualities of RESTy interfaces are only slightly impacted by JSON / XMLHTTP, imho. more problematic: the js obfuscation.

Swivel

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

sweet. more data web. i hope they have a decent back-end.

Google data portability

Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle. “If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users. The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better.”

so maybe now marc canter can drop his “GData lock-in” claims
2007-03-07: matt lists the ways we let you take your data with you

Great Database in the Sky

He characterized Google as giving unstructured people access to unstructured data whereas MySQL gives structured people access to structured data, meaning that MySQL is targeted towards developers who understand how to structure data “properly”. A strange polarization in my view, but I guess he’s trying to put clear blue water between the Google approach and the traditional database approach. At Talis, we don’t see this distinction at all and our core platform technology, Bigfoot, unifies structured and unstructured data.He went on to describe his vision of a skype for database access, combining my data, your data and public data into the next generation OLAP, running a trillion transactions per day. An example could be weather data and he asked what if you could run a SQL statement across all the data sources in the world, something like SELECT CurrentWindDirection, CurrentWindSpeed FROM AllTheWorldsWeatherStations, MyOwnWeatherStation, MyFriendsWeatherStation.

mysql to promote the data web, seems a bit unaware of semweb tech though, but one can hope

New digital divide

Over at thoughtstorms, they are discussing a new digital divide:

In the future we’ll see the world increasingly divided into 2 classes : the information-rich haves, and the information-poor have-nots.
But ironically the exploited, impoverished, have-nots, will be those who are duped into paying increasingly more for decreasingly valuable proprietary information products.
Meanwhile the cash rich, information rich will increasingly rely on superior, free information products : open source software such as Linux, public service programming from the BBC, the online communities of enthusiasts in every field, united through blogging, mailing lists and other discussion forums etc.

why is there no free entertainment when there is an abundance of free knowledge? i think knowledge accrues, while entertainment does not. entertainment atoms do not build upon each other in the same way that knowledge atoms do. maybe this is the return of a protestant work ethic?
only those who produce will prevail