More into “free” data sources – Swivel

I think I’ve posted about Swivel before on a past blog, but I found myself digging through it again. And I’ll have to say that I found myself once again disappointed by it. It might contain good data, but in general it’s a letdown mostly because on most searches for data the only thing I can find is noise. Either data with not enough information for you to understand like (which is the second hit when you search for “Seattle”):

Or it’s just something that is probably better classified as “private”:

Elite Activity Membership Growth : Note, before you become trigger happy and open this link, let me explain what is it about. Elite Activity apparently is some sort of religion and this graph shows their membership growth for March and May 2008 (not even consecutive months) to be somehow flat. That’s all it has! And how did I find it? It was one of the 4 most viewed data sets today.

So, there are some limitations with the site. But we try to look beyond them into what is really missing with it. Here are some suggestions:

1. Allow to add and filter by graph metadata: let’s say that I want to get recent data for Seattle. I should be able to specifically specify that I want city data, the city name is Seattle and that the data should contain the year 2007 or 2008.
2. Provide the ability to cleanup duplicate information
3. Somehow cache the source for the data. Many places I tried to click on the source link to understand the data, but I received a 404 or even a DNS error for the site. If they want to allow people to get data from different sites and use them to authenticate the data, they should make sure that the sites contain the data
4. Provide the ability to easily merge and reconcile apparent redundant data from multiple graphs. Sometimes there are some spikes on “fun” data that appears out there and people probably flock to create their own visualization of this data. After the fun is gone, because the data is already a couple of years old, it would be good to be able to clean it up and combine those visualization of the same data.

This is just a short list of things that would improve the site. But one thing that really bugs me with it (mostly because of my current open data mindset) is that they are nice to allow you to import data from multiple places, but the only “API” they seem to have is a way to dump it to Excel. What if I want to cross-relate this data with other thing on my web service? I’m out of luck.