David Huynh wrote: > I'm curious-- have you considered using other technologies/services like > Google Base, Ning, ManyEyes, and then the new buzzing FreeBase to > manage, visualize, and publish your data? If you have, then why are you > not using them in this case? Just curious :-) Thanks.
ManyEyes I have looked at before and I think it is a very interesting development, although obviously it would benefit hugely from the availability of semantically annotated quantitative datasets, and from visualisation tools which use that semantic annotation to help users explore and visualise the data. I've just started work on that for epidemiological and population health data. As it stands, I don't think that ManyEyes provides sufficiently rich tools to allow others to explore other aspects of data - only one or a limited, fairly simplistic set of views are available, although the datasets are there to allow other views of the same data to be created - but the process for doing so it not as spontaneous or as quick as it might be. There also needs to be a facility for linking multiple views with a commentary in order to tell a story or make a case for a particular evidence-based conclusion or assertion. But I digress. Ning seems to be a social networking facility, not really what we need for allowing people to browse and explore information about free, open source health software. FreeBase looks very interesting indeed, in all the ways that Google Base is not, but both suffer from the fact that they are, in the end, proprietary databases stored on someone else's computer. If FreeBase content (meaning all the annotations and relationships which people end up adding to content) really are licensed under a Creative Commons licenses and there is a way of extracting and moving the data elsewhere for re-use or re-purposing, then it may well be a good solution. But at the moment they seem to be at an early stage and I haven't been offered a test account despite requesting one, so it is hard to tell. Also, for the purposes of OSHCA, which is an international group promoting free, open source software in health, we prefer to use things which are themselves free and open source software, like Exhibit. None of the others discussed above are. Tim C _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
