Socrata: Mash Up and Analytical Wonderland
June 2, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to the June 2, 2009, announcement about Socrata’s “social” public data sets. The company behind this collection of data sets is Socrata (formerly Blist), based in Seattle. You can read the company’s news release here. The news release said, “[Socrata is] a social network that aggregates public data from around the world in a single destination.” The news release stated:
Socrata.com enables anyone with a Web browser to find understandable and sortable datasets on a myriad of topics including healthcare, energy, retirement, education or the environment, just to name a few. Users can create customized views and filters of the data based on any criteria in the dataset such as state, zip code or income. Most importantly, these personalized views can then be saved and socialized through an entire social network, whether it be business colleagues, families or others supporting the same cause. As in other social networks, users can create profiles, post comments, rate content, and establish groups for sharing information privately.
When I looked at the service, I thought about Wolfram Alpha and a series of documents I read by Ramanathan Guha, now at Google. I will explore the service in more depth because it looks interesting. I wonder what vendors of data sets think about the sudden interest in this type of information.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2009
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