Thursday, December 07, 2006

Swivel

Darn. I didn't think of Swivel. Then again, you didn't think of it, either.

Swivel is described as "YouTube for data". Not just for uploading and viewing data... but also for madly cross-tabulating. Wow!

As a database professional, I'm kind of embarrassed that two physicists came up with it. But I'm the spouse of a physicist... so I'm kind of proud, too.

Anyway, I was interested in seeing what sort of data was in there on gender issues... so I searched Swivel on "gender" and got... no hits. Wow. I decided to look for some data worth uploading - say, that frightening "Balancing the Equation" study showing a steady drop of women working in information technology. Well, that study appears to be in send-us-cash-and-we'll-mail-it-to-you form; in fact, I don't see a lot of raw, upload-worthy data out on the web at all. Hmm. Any ideas?

There's got to be some mailing list of Swivel contributors out there somewhere; I guess I should find it and ask them where they find their raw data.

I'm dying to know what RDBMS they run on...

1 comment:

Dmitry Dimov said...

Catherine,

Maybe if we were good physicists we'd be doing hard core physics instead, not playing pretend statisticians. But we do remember our professors giving us grief for not labeling graph axes.

Regarding finding data: it's insane how much stuff is out there, really. Asking money for data that is probably in the public domain in the first place is silly, we hope Swivel will make all these guys irrelevant. Keep looking, it helps to add the words data, historical, csv, tables and the like to your searches. We are also adding the ability to comment on the data sets, so you can ask people where they get the data from, but many Swivelers fill in the Source field so you can see where the data came from.

Happy swiveling, hope to see you back at Swivel messing around with data and graphs.