RE: Nice Data Cleansing Tool Demo

Hello,

> >> Now here is the obvious question, re. broader realm of faceted data
> >> navigation, have you guys digested the underlying concepts
> >> demonstrated by Microsoft Pivot?
> >>
> >
> > I've seen the TED talk on Pivot. It's a very well polished
> > implementation of faceted browsing. The Seadragon technology
> > integration and animations are well executed. As far as "underlying
> > concepts" in faceted browsing go, I haven't noticed anything novel
there.

I agree with David here, nothing novel about the underlying concept. 
One thing I found quite nice and haven't seen before is grouping results
along one facet dimension (the bar-graph representation of results). I think
that is a neat idea. 

The integration of Seadragon and deep-zooming looks nice, but little more
than that. 
Not all objects render into nice pictures, and the interaction of zooming in
and out isn't a helpful one in my opinion. The zooming gives the impression
at first that the position of objects in that 2D space is meaningful, but it
is not.  
It's an eye-catcher, not more.


> > One thing to note: in each Pivot demo example, there is data of
> > exactly one type only--say, type people. So it seems, using Microsoft
> > Pivot, you can't pivot from one type to another, say, from people to
> > their companies. You can't do that example I used for Parallax: US
> > presidents -> children -> schools. Or skyscrapers -> architects ->
> > other buildings. So from what I've seen, as it currently is, Microsoft
> > Pivot cannot be used for browsing graphs because it cannot pivot (over
> > graph links).
> Yes, this is a limitation re. general faceted browsing concepts.

No, it's a limitation of the current implementations of faceted browsing.
Not a general problem with faceted browsing.


> The most interesting part to me is the use of an alternative symbol
> mechanism for the human interaction aspect i.e., deep zoom images where
> you would typically see a long human unfriendly URI.

"Where you would typically see URIs"? Really? 


> > Furthermore, I believe that to get Pivot to perform well, you need a
> > cleaned up, *homogeneous* data set, presumably of small size (see
> > their Wikipedia example in which they picked only the top 500 most
> > visited articles). SW/linked data in their natural habitat, however,
> > is rarely that cleaned up and homogeneous ... 

Is  that really a problem of Linked Data Web as such? I don't think so.
There is a lot of badly structured, not well cleaned up data on the current
Linked Data Web. Because there was so much excitement about publishing
anything in the early day, and so little attention to the actual data that's
getting published. That is going to change. 

> > So by the time you can
> > use Pivot on SW/linked data, you will already have solved all the
> > interesting and challenging problems.
> This part is what I call an innovation slot since we have hooked it into
our
> DBMS hosted faceted engine and successfully used it over very large data
> sets. 

Kingsley, I'm wondering: How did you do that? I tried it myself, and it
doesn't work. Pivot can't make use of server-side faceted browsing engines.
You need to send *all* the data to the Pivot client, and it computes the
facets and performs any filtering operation client-side. Works well for up
to around 1k objects, but that's it. Pivot's architecture is in that sense
very much like Exhibit in Silverlight.


Best,
Georgi

--
Georgi Kobilarov
Uberblic Labs Berlin
http://blog.georgikobilarov.com

Received on Monday, 29 March 2010 14:19:04 UTC