DabbleDB

Concord has an account for DabbleDB, ask Trudi or me for the info Stephen Bannasch.

Dabble Db combines features of both spreadsheets and databases in a very interesting way. Digg is a very popular site where large numbers of users post links to, descriptions, and associated tags of news and content they find interesting over the web. Submissio0n get rated higher as more people "digg" them (rate them highly). The top-rated submissions are all available as feeds. This is a classic Web 2.0 site where the value is produced by a community of users. For today just think of it a source of large dynamically generated data sets.

While you watch this and remember that the functionality you are seeing is all done in the browser with Javascript and CSS. There is no Java or Flash. It is a very good example of where smart use of web 2.0 technology is going.

http://dabbledb.com/explore/screencasts/digg/

There are two very interesting things going on there to me: 1) the manipulation and analysis of information in a different public feeds to answer interesting questions the group making the feeds available didn't think of; 2) the elegant and powerful design and UI implementation of DabbleDB for exploring data – I haven't seen another application which makes data exploration and relational modeling so easy – and I was amazed that this all ran in the browser.

I'd like to see a similar tool for both scientific and pedagogic data that includes some of what DabbleDb does, some of what TableTop does, and a bunch of what CCGraph does and can do.

I think it would be fine to start by extending what we already do in Java ... but we need to find some way to explore more of the edges about what can be done with the great new web 2.0 technologies. I'll bet we could re-implement most of what's in CCGraph in Javascript, CSS, and SVG. The advantage in using the web 2.0 suite of technologies is that they are lighter weight and are much easier and faster to develop new UIs and collaborative prototypes.