

Show HN: Facster.com technology demonstration - jackfoxy

I am presenting for your consideration not so much the Facster.com website (a prototype with some rough edges) but the underlying technology. I’ve long been dissatisfied with the availability and presentation of raw data on the internet. Here is what Facster does:<p>1) All data from any source on one unified graph
2) Time series data presented in original n-dimensions
3) Full key-word search 
4) Browsing  by the original publisher’s organization
5) Data selected from any source joinable to any other selections
6) Full data provenance, sources, footnotes, etc.<p>Superficially Facster supports time-series data, but when you consider any datum has some sort of time attribute, all data can be put in the Facster schema, allowing discovery and joining with any other data.<p>The web site includes three full editions of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, one edition of the Statistical Abstract of California, and a small abstract of the 2000 census.<p>The goal: pull all government, industry, and NGO abstracts into the Facster schema and onto the Facster graph.<p>P.S. If you throw an error, please send replication steps to the support email on the contact page.
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dillydally
Where's the demo?

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jackfoxy
When I refer to Facster.com as a "demo", most every link (except the obvious
ones like external links and links to the contact page) is walking through the
site content using features of the API. You could, for instance follow the
links to browse all the 4,591 data series currently on the Facster graph.

Searching currently requires an exact match on keyword (obvious room for
improvement there). Search results are organized in a single fashion, but
could theoretically be organized in many different ways. Also UIs could be
devised to derive more value from available meta data. A RESTful interface
could be bolted onto the system. In short, there are many other uses that
could be made of the Facster graph.

Look to the search results for instructions to derive custom data series
through joining selections from disparate data series, and notice the search
page keeps track of your custom selections during your session.

So in other words "demo" means this is a very rudimentary use of a diverse
unified data graph.

