I’ve been checking out Swivel this morning and I have to say I’m excited. A friend described it best when he said it looks like a YouTube for data. Its so easy to add data and start using it.
Step 1: I loaded the career stats for Orlando Cepeda. I used the web query tool in MS Excel to import the data into a Excel workbook and then saved the data out as a CSV to import into Swivel.
Step 2: You then can preview the data to make sure it imported in correctly.
Step 3: You then can set the field types and unit of measure.
Step 4: Describe the data you have uploaded, where you got it, give it a picture (from Flickr, but you can choose anyplace later)
Step 5: Explore your data that you’ve uploaded
The graphs are not too bad and you can even embed them on your webpage like this:
Of course not everyone enjoys baseball as much as I do, but you can compare any other uploaded data via graph such as Per Capita Income vs. Unleaded Regular Gas Price
I’m as excited about Swivel as I was about Zillow. I can only imagine where this will lead as uploading and working with your data and data of others is just so simple. YouTube for data is right.
3 responses so far ↓
1
Frank
// Dec 6, 2006 at 3:12 pm
So how can I use this data in my existing applications? I don’t see an API yet.
2
visnu
// Dec 6, 2006 at 5:46 pm
actually, for data input and output, we _started_ with an api amazingly. it got to be too unwieldy, especially in the beginning when we were trying all sorts of different ideas. it’ll be back, i promise.
visnu
swivel engineer person
3 Swivel did have an API at James Fee GIS Blog // Dec 6, 2006 at 7:41 pm
[...] Visnu, a Swivel engineer, wrote the following in the comments of my Swivel post: actually, for data input and output, we _started_ with an api amazingly. it got to be too unwieldy, especially in the beginning when we were trying all sorts of different ideas. it’ll be back, i promise. [...]
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