[okfn-labs] Spending story: US city bankruptcies

Thu Aug 16 12:29:31 UTC 2012

On 11 August 2012 23:58, Gregor Aisch <gregor.aisch at okfn.org> wrote:

>
> Am 10.08.2012 um 09:59 schrieb Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
>
> On 9 August 2012 19:49, Gregor Aisch <gregor.aisch at okfn.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Rufus
>
> Maybe you can help me out, but isn't this:
>
>  http://timeliner.reclinejs.com/
>
> an exact copy of this:
>
>  http://timeline.verite.co/#embed
>
>
> No, it isn't :-)
>
> First off, ReclineJS itself in general re-uses existing best-of-breed
> viz tools and connects them with backends (it doesn't want to reinvent
> a great graphing library, or mapping library or timeline library). So
> the timeline component is primarily But it also connects them with
> multiple data sources (so e.g. I've use the Timeliner with data from
> ElasticSearch or the DataHub).
>
> Thanks a lot for clearing this up. Until now I still had this vague idea
> of ReclineJS being a sort of JavaScript clone of Google Refine, mainly
> intended to clean data (and not to visualize and publish it). Maybe that's
> because of the name similarity and the grid/facet component ReclineJS
> started with.
>

Understood. I should probably be a bit clear that Recline qua library has 3
segments:

* "Model": i.e. dataset, records etc
* "Backends": connectors to data sources
* "Views": map, timeline, graph etc

I emphasize that one can use Model (or Backends) without using views at
all. Morever, I think those are the bits that are most re-usabe.

IMO, the views (and UI components generally unless they are very basic) are
the hardest thing to reuse since you always to tweak something or do a view
in a particular way.

That said, I've got a lot of mileage for basic stuff just using the views
as is

> Btw, the same misunderstanding also was the reason why I was suprised to
> see http://transformer.datahub.io/ not being released as a feature of
> ReclineJS.
>

Key thing is that ReclineJS is a library *not* an app. Originally it was
sort of being both but that's painful. The app stuff has split out of
Recline and is now the DataExplorer:

http://explorer.datahub.io/
https://github.com/okfn/dataexplorer

Going to your specific point the basic transform view is in Recline:
http://reclinejs.com/demos/multiview/?currentView=transform

However, as shown by the Transformer app you always want to do a load more
and make a proper app (in this case integrate with github etc etc). My
feeling here is make a core library and then build apps that try to do
(approximately) one thing and one thing well. (A better question is why is
transformer not in data explorer. Answer there is just about doing one
single thing rather than multiple and I think there could well be a
backwards merge there ....)

> And, just for the records, I currently work on a open source project with
> a very similar goal as you described (connecting viz libraries to data
> backends), which is called Datawrapper. I'm sure it'll be interesting to
> learn from each other, although both projects admittedly have quite
>
different target groups.
>
> https://github.com/datawrapper/datawrapper
>

Very exciting Gregor and with you involved this is bound to be good and
interesting :-)

Perhaps there could be a way to join forces or share either concepts or
code?

Rufus
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