Benjamin Wiederkehr's Blog » Database

DataZoo

Benjamin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:14:31 +0000

Finding open data on the web is sometimes a hard job. Especially if you haven’t realy a clear vision of the data you need. So what’s out there if you have a lazy sunday afternoon, Flash / Processing / Python or Arduio set up and going, a boost of creativity but a lack of data do visualize? In the stage of scribbling down ideas and creating sketches of those slick interfaces it’s a show-stopper to go trough google.com to find the dataset you want in the fileformat you need.

Exactly for this case I’ve launched DataZoo. It’s a repository of links to open available datasets. It’s maintained by the community itself and everybody is welcome to contribute to the list.

The application was built using delicious.com as the aggregation engine of links tagged with “datazoo” and the feed.informer.com application. Feed.informer let’s you melt different feeds together and provides you with the necessary Javascript or PHP codesnippet to include it in your own site.

I’ve tagged a small set of links to ignite the flame of collaboration – feel free to contribute and help to grow the zoo.

UPDATE: With the arrival of steady growing data platforms like data.gov and the like, I decided to stop aggregating external links. With these well structured archives, finding data just got a lot easier.

Candeo

Benjamin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:57:25 +0000

Candeo is the bachelor project I developed with my co-worker Christian Siegrist. It’s documentation is available on a seperate website. Please note that all of the content is written in german. If you need the content translated in english or an other language, feel free to get in touch with me.

SoftwareVisualization ²

Benjamin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:34:41 +0000

Brief

Software Visualization 2 is based on the work from the Software Visualization Project. We had 3 weeks to refine our prototype in partnership with students from the University for IT in Zurich. The working relationship was very useful to check the usability and the value delivered by my visualization.

View the full documentation at iad.projects.hgkz.ch/infovis07

Internos

Benjamin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:33:47 +0000

DatabaseSystems

Benjamin — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Brief

Sorry, I didn’t had the chance to put it here but it will follow, promised!

Solution

Thanks to the openness of the task I took the chance to convert some aspects from the SoftVis prototype adapt it to a different data source. I wanted to take live data and therefore I chose an existing WordPress database and rewrote the prototype to fit the new dataset. During the developement I struggled quite a bit with the handmade php script to connect to the database and as a solution wrote the SWX-Wordpress API that is now freely available for download.