By now, you have probably seen Sir Tim Berners-Lee talking about the importance of Open Data at this year’s TED conference. If you haven’t here it is. Take a look because it’s important:
I’m posting this now because the Open Data movement seems to be getting some traction–at least in Government circles. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration launched Data.gov a clearing house for government data. Washington D.C. has become a leader in municipal public data, putting some 260 feeds of data out in raw form. And now the UK has decided to get in on the act: Gordon Brown the embattled Prime Minister, announced yesterday that none other than Sir Tim Himself would be heading up the initiative to open England’s data up to the public.
This was largely damage control after a series of embarrassing disclosures about how members of Parliament expense things, but it is a welcome development all the same.
We here at Graphient wish Sir Tim the best of luck moving forward and very much hope that FreeTime will become the application of choice for those looking at all that data.
We’re eleven days to our first Beta and I haven’t really posted about what it is that we’re actually making here.
Graphient is building an application called FreeTime. FreeTime makes dynamic visual time lines out of whatever data or records you have laying around provided they have a time stamp or an identifiable time component. It doesn’t matter to FreeTime whether this is a database of some kind, or a spreadsheet or a website. FreeTime uses the common framework of time to bring all these kinds of data into one view so the user can explore it better. Because time is a common dimension to data and information FreeTime can bring data from many different disciplines together.
Example uses include really simple stuff like interactive historical time lines, or very complex things like media analysis or longitudinal study analysis. Some people we’ve talked to just want to use it to see what music they were listening to on a particular day.
We see time as a way to create context for the rapidly proliferating large-open-data-sets out there. We’ll be talking more about this as things develop. In the meantime, if you’re interested in being a beta tester get in touch.
