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Ideas for improving infochimps.org
Infochimps.org is brand-new as of March 2008, and we're still furiously assembling its structure like a parent assembling a bike on Christmas eve.
If you have ideas about how to improve the site or to correct the many ways in which the site falls short, please share them! The TODO page at help.infochimps.org lists the immediate tasks we've set, so first take a gander over there if you can.
If you have ideas about how to improve the site or to correct the many ways in which the site falls short, please share them! The TODO page at help.infochimps.org lists the immediate tasks we've set, so first take a gander over there if you can.
I’m looking for advice!
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Inappropriate?This isn't really an important issue, but the overall design of the website could use a few visual adjustments. It's not ugly, but it does feel a little jumbled. Again, not a major issue, I'm just picky. :) -
Inappropriate?I bet you are correct... the problem is that we have experts in data mining who are hack amateurs at website design driving this bus.
Realizing this, our approach is to keep things visually simple yet retain as much flexibility as possible in how we store the (rapidly evolving) metadata that characterize each dataset/field/contributor/collection. (So, for example, the long list of paragraph boxes that follow 'usage notes' are simply autogenerated from what's in the dataset description. When you see a whole paragraph box devoted to one footnote it's cause the page-drawing orangutang doesn't know a footnote from anything else).
So what I'm saying is: yes, it is probably jumbled, and some of that murkiness reflects incomplete clarity of concept. But improving apart from that is honestly beyond our expertise.
If you (or anyone else reading this) has a friend who does information & website design and would like to try their hand at a more forceful presentation of this information, we'd love their assistance. (Same goes for anyone really good at rails programming, database/scalable web server design, data visualization, nurturing online communities, IP law, programming frameworks design; and as always people to contribute data, convert data to open formats, and curate metadata.) This project will only succeed if we can get wikipedia/linux/etc style community involvement among people with diverse talents. -
Inappropriate?The Python Edu-Sig had a thread awhile back on Rich Data Streams (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-...). Some of the suggested sources of data:
Data set ideas for the OLPC project: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational...
CIESE Collaborative Projects: http://www.k12science.org/collabprojs...
LT Technologies spreadsheet resources: http://www.lttechno.com/links/spreads...
List of Spanish names: http://wiki.gleducar.org.ar/wiki/Nomb...
XML dataset of cities: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python...
Reusable Data for Education Exercises: http://wiki.python.org/moin/EduSig/Da...
And the dataset from http://www.theyrule.net/ could be very interesting to play with.
I hope that helps. I love the idea of your project, and would really like one-stop shopping for all of these data sets, especially as a place to point students, friends, and colleagues at.
I’m grateful
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Inappropriate?One more suggestion is that you have an open web interface, such as GData provides. I suggest basing it on the Atom Publichsing Protocol, as it is a very well-thought out way to expose data on the web (and GData builds on it as well). This way it will be possible (and convenient) to write libraries for various programming languages to pull data from the site. I would even be willing to help with a version of such a library for Python. For an example of a language which incorporates rich data sets very well, see Frink (http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/)
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Looks like a typo on the home page http://infochimps.org/ :
"representations can give way give way to"
Just wanted to mention it so that it can be fixed.
Nicolas Raoul ( http://nrw.free.fr )
I’m happy
