NYCFacets is just the first installment towards our ultimate vision of a network of data-driven pediacities.
What is a “pediacity”, you might ask? It’s a smart wiki-like system that collaborates all kinds of datasources about a city – from a city’s Open Data portal, to statistics from the US Census, reviews from Yelp, gatherings in Meetup.com, [...]
NYC is in the middle of a startup boom, thanks, in no small part to the multi-pronged initiatives being pushed by the Bloomberg administration.
And with the recently passed NYC Open Data Bill, things will only get more interesting fast (and we hope, Ontodia will have a role in further accelerating Open Data Innovation).
However, I’ve always [...]
When Sami and I started brainstorming last November, we quickly decided what we wanted to do – a “smart” NYCpedia of sorts, backed by federated, structured data – given my semtech background and Sami’s SEO chops.
We were even foolish enough to think we can submit three BigApps entries towards achieving that goal – NYCFacets, NYCIdeator [...]
With the recent passage of NYC’s landmark Open Data Bill, the stage is set for NYC to become the premier Digital City of the Future.
But as referred to in the Roadmap, having Data is not enough. You need a Platform.
And the city is doing a great job with its multi-prong “City as a Platform” strategy that [...]
The Early Days of Search Engine Optimization
During the early days of the Internet, search was dumb – pure keyword search, and manually maintained directories were the order of the day. But as the Internet exploded, these techniques started to fail until Google showed up with PageRank and quickly dominated search.
And as the Internet kept expanding [...]
In the mid 90s, I got a chance to work on NYPD‘s Narcotic Investigation and Tracking of Recidivist Offenders (NITRO). This was during the early days of CompStat, when NYPD started using data-based policing strategies. Back then, it was still mainly mainframes and pin maps as I did my regular visits to Police Plaza and [...]
Read moreIn fact, we’ve stored about 1.4 million metadata facts across 890 datasets.
Why so much? There couldn’t possibly be that much metadata in the NYC Open Data catalog.
And you’re right, less than a third of it is conventional metadata. We also sampled each dataset. And against these, we’ve calculated lots of “extrametadata” – stats, scores, machine [...]
Its been a hectic 2.5 months! Creating NYCFacets was no small feat but we finally got it up and running and submitted our entry to NYCBigApps with 58 minutes to spare.
There are still some fit & finish issues here and there, so please bear with us, as we continue to work and refine NYCFacets. Just [...]
