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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Needlebase: Data Gathering and VisualizationTool

In Readwriteweb: " ... Needlebase, a great new point-and-click tool for extracting, sorting and visualizing data from across pages around the web. I've been using it for all kinds of things and now you can too. When we first reviewed Needle here on ReadWriteWeb, it was in closed beta and new users had to request an account. Now it's open and available for all: free for personal use or by subscription for commercial use. Check out some examples of ways I've used this exciting new technology below ... "

What does it do?
◦acquire data from multiple sources: A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design.

◦merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record. Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source.

◦build and publish custom data views: Use Needle's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map. Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database.

Based on the examples shown  this looks to be a very useful tool for scraping relatively modest amounts information from web pages and doing basic manipulation and visualization.   Work experimenting with, as I am.

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