
Show HN: dstack.ai – publish, track, and share data visualizations - kaudinya
https://dstack.ai
======
kaudinya
Hi HN,

I am Riwaj from dstack.ai. dstack.ai offers a convenient way to publish,
share, and track data visualizations, analysis results, and data reports.

In our experience, as of now, many data analysts and data scientists work
through the data in various tools such as excel, Jupyter notebook, etc. and
then share the graphic with their peers, managers or clients using local
network drives or emails in the form of PDFs or PowerPoints. There is also a
growing number of users and teams who use BI Tools, Tableau, Superset or build
custom applications to organize interactive dashboards and reports. When it
comes to tracking the visualizations or analyzing results, some teams resort
to work around methods such as printing the result in a document and then
using version control tools over the document. In summary, there are a variety
of tools available for exploring, tracking and sharing reports, but many of
these allow to publish reports generated by their own tools thus allowing for
very little flexibility for a team that works with multiple programming
languages, tools, and plotting libraries.

We at dstack.ai have built a light-weight solution where you can publish the
data visualizations via APIs from anywhere (a Jupyter notebook, a script or an
application) and store them in our web application (which is also mobile
friendly) for collaboration with teams and clients, i.e., you can share the
published charts via URL and comment on each stored chart (think of
Instagram). Our current version supports Python and R as programming
languages, and Matplotlib, Ggplot2, Plotly and Bokeh as plotting libraries. In
our first version, we only support static charts and basic interactive charts,
i.e., if you stored charts with certain parameters, the users who browse
through those charts can play with only those specific parameter values.

We think there is a lot more one can offer to improve the current process of a
collaborative exploration of data visualization for teams. As basic as our
current solution is, we are currently working on releasing new features such
as \- Organizing the charts into dashboards \- User groups and permission
management \- Plugins for spreadsheets such as Google docs and MS Excel \-
Dynamic plots and dashboard that fetches data from a data source and can be
scheduled to update regularly \- A mobile application to access the
visualizations, \- On-prem options

We would love to hear about your challenges in the area of collaboration
around data visualization, and receive any feedback on what we currently have.
For your reference, here is the documentation for product usage.
[https://docs.dstack.ai](https://docs.dstack.ai)

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shail619
DataViz-as-a-service?

~~~
kaudinya
Hi shail619, the service we offer is currently tailored for collaboration on
data visualizations. We hope that our current solution bridges the two parties
that work with data reports - those who produce it and those who use it to
make business decisions. In the future, we aim to extend our service to other
kinds of data services around data science and data engineering.

~~~
shail619
Actually, thinking about it more, it sounds more like a marketplace.. a market
place that brings together the dataviz producers and consumers.. ebay for data
viz of sorts almost

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boltzmannbrain
So it's plot.ly, but costs money?

Oh I see you have a dot-ai domain. Very cool.

~~~
cheptsov
Hi, a co-founder here. My name is Andrey. Actually, Plotly is our source of
inspiration in a way. However, I think, the problem we are trying to solve
lies a different direction. Just a few points to show how we are different:
1\. We would like to support Plotly as one of the plot libraries (which is
super great by the way). In addition we'd like to support many other libraries
– anything that the user is using, incl. ggplot2, Matplotlib, Bokeh, etc. 2\.
We would like to combine the approaches Plotly offers in two different
products (Chart Studio and Dash) into one and simplify the process of
reporting data and the process of organizing dashboards. 3\. Ideally, we'd
like to help companies also organize and simplify their security around
accessing the data. 4\. We'd like to help build dashboards easier – by
eliminating the needs of development entirely.

Just also want to mention, that our current offering and all other basic
functionality that we will add, such as permission control, dashboards, etc
will remain free. Anyway, it's just a start for us to really learn what our
potential customers and users are doing and build that things that are
currently missing – not blindly copying anyone's features. Having said that,
I'd still like to thank you for your feedback. In case you have an idea of how
we can help your teams collaborate around data, please let me know andrey at
dstack.ai

