[okfn-labs] Data Transformer renamed to Data Explorer http://explorer.datahub.io/ - plus lots of improvements

Wed Dec 12 22:10:51 UTC 2012

Hi All,

Wanted to let people know that the data transformer [1] has seen quite
a bit of improvement and has also been merged with the existing Data
Explorer taking on its name and url:

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

[1]: http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/07/31/data-transformer-cleaning-up-data-in-the-browser.html

Improvements:

* Full viewer including slickgrid Grid, Leaflet map and Flotr2 graph
(from recline multiview - this is really what the previous data
explorer was)

* Import data from multiple sources including gdocs, CSVs, github etc

* It has the start of a data "Project" and workflow. The project
includes the dataset (source), scripts (for processing the data),
views (such as config for specific graphs and maps) [2] [3].

In particular, info about datasets you load are stored in local
storage so you can easily reload when you come back to the site. This
is very rudimentary and at the moment you can only store one project
(this can be fixed in one line but I won't get to this until next
weekend!)

I also plan to add support for storing scripts etc very soon (next
would be serialization of all of this to gists or github repos).

[2]: https://github.com/okfn/dataexplorer/issues/24
[3]: https://github.com/okfn/dataexplorer/issues/25

* Github login in a popup and is not required for normal use
https://github.com/okfn/dataexplorer/issues/21

* Direct load datasets from url parameter config which means you can
share links for people e.g.:
<http://explorer.datahub.io/?url=http://resources.opendatalabs.org/datasets/standard-and-poors-500-shiller/data/data.csv&backend=csv>

NB: you cannot just link to any old CSV on the internet at the moment
but need one on a server with CORS support (NB: s3 and google storage
support CORS now, hurrah!). however we could fix this by adding in
support via DataProxy ...

* Save to github working again thanks to Martin Keegan

Rufus