Data Aggregation – InfoChimps: What they could become

According to InfoChimps they are a venture “trying to increase the world’s access to structured data.” A noble cause indeed (and something Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, has been advocating in a much more radical form known as the semantic web). With so much information strewn throughout the web, taking pieces of data and tying it all together, although a goliath of a task may lead to interesting possibilities. Consider taking the most popular tags that were generated out of twitter for a particular location and then mashing that with demographic information for a particular location. Will we pull up interesting information? Perhaps.

Currently InfoChimps offers data sets from myriad sources that either people/organizations are offering up for free or for a price. For example, you can get a monthly breakdown of the search tags from twitter for free, but if you wanted the same breakdown by the hour it will cost you roughly USD 8000. This is a great start, but we need more. It would be great if InfoChimps store their data in structure forms, so that users can create mash-ups of various types of data and then have that be available to the public via APIs. Additionally, it would also be great if they can start to mine their own data-sets to identify patterns generate the interest of the public. There is plenty more that they could be doing and are possible working on, which can turn out to be exciting and interesting for the rest of us.

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