metaLayer has been selected as one of the 10 startups picked for the Startup Showcase at Strata 2012 in Santa Clara. This is in addition to our keynote “Democratizing Data Platforms” which we’ll be giving at the conference as well.
(Source: strataconf.com)
The problem with infographics is that they are hard to create, time-consuming to design, or expensive to outsource. Not too mention that most infographics are static, meaning that they don’t update in real time. Now this is great if you’ve got data that changes rather infrequently. But what if you want to create compelling visualizations that are driven by real-time data?
The mission of metaLayer is to make the creation of such data-driven visuals easy for anyone (not just expert data scientists and hackers).
We want to offer our users an ‘insight engine’ that allows them to do more than search for answers, rather they can compute their own or discover what others have done. More importantly, they can ask questions of the data created.
We aim to make data on the web more transparent, more interactive, and subsequently easier to understand and share.
In metaLayer users can easily create and share infographics like one below, styled to match the channel that it’s delivered on (their blog, website, etc.)
…however, what’s really cool is that their audience has the option of diving into the data that was used to create said graphic:
metaLayer comes out of private beta in February after some very big announcements at Strata. We’re looking forward to showing you exactly what we’ve been working on!
metaLayer is excited to give a keynote talk at Strata 2012 in a few weeks. We’ll share our vision on why data platforms need to be made accessible. Check out the schedule and some of the other talks here.
Democratization of Data Platforms
Jonathan Gosier (metaLayer Inc.)
8:50am Thursday, 03/01/2012
Keynote
Location: Mission City Ballroom
Big data isn’t just an abstract problem for corporations, financial firms, and tech companies. To your mother, a ‘big data’ problem might simply be too much email, or a lost file on her computer.
We need to democratize access to the tools used for understanding information by taking the hard-work out of drawing insight from excessive quantities of information. To help humans process content more efficiently and to help them capture more of their world.
Tools to effectively do this need to be visual, intuitive, and quick. This talk looks at some of the data visualization platforms that are helping to solve big data problems for normal people.
The online chatter of individuals, networks of friends or professionals, and the data being created by networked devices is growing exponentially, although our time to consume it remains depressingly finite. There are a plethora of solutions that approach this problem in different ways. But what are the methodologies that have worked at scale and how are they being used in the field?
This is an excerpt from an article we contributed to InQTel Quarterly earlier this month. You can read it in it’s entirety at the the link below.
Are you a data hacker, data journalist, or just a programmer looking for something new? Use our imgLayer and dataLayer APIs for your next project and we’ll send you an awesome metaLayer T-Shirt…just for letting us know! You can find details at wiki.metalayer.com.
You do not need an API key to get started but you will be rate limited to 100 calls a day for text data and 10 calls per day for image dat. Get in touch with us if you want those rates raised.
Here’s a recent example of a cool project powered by our APIs and a few open source products.
Our friends at a firm called GeoSprocket gave a great breakdown yesterday of how they used a combination of technologies to discover trends in online conversations during and after Hurricane Irene. Their challenge, though, is that most Twitter messages don’t carry location data and to get all this content on a map might prove incredibly time consuming for a human.
Our dataLayer API aims to make this a far simpler process through a technique called location disambiguation (also known as place finding). This is done by using the other contextual clues that follow online communication, for instance the language someone might used can be combed for words that might appear to be places. ’50 Broadway’ may exist in 100 places in the world, but if it appears next to the word ‘New York’ the algorithm assumes that it’s 50 Broadway, New York, NY which has the Latitude and Longitude coordinate of 40.7061622, -74.0128389. Since this is done algorithmically, it gives the appearance of messages with no location elements, being mapped somewhat magically.
It’s important to note that neither location disambiguation nor sentiment analysis are perfect sciences but the method can greatly increase the percentage of online chatter that can be mapped in the absence of all other information. Here’s what GeoSprocket Director Bill Morris had to say about his project…
This is where new developments in “Big Data” analytics come in handy. With some computational heavy lifting from Kate Starbird at the University of Colorado and Chris Danforth at the University of Vermont, Geosprocket was able to bank millions of Twitter posts from the days surrounding the storm. Then the assistance of metaLayer Inc. was instrumental in putting Irene-related tweets on the map. Using a series of digital sifting processes, they were able to mine the archived Twitter data for placenames and keywords. Where a town or street name was included in a post, that post could be placed at a set of geographic coordinates. Were words like “washout” and “devastated” were used, fine-tuned algorithms could assign a scaled value for the sentiment of the post.
Add a bit of cartographic styling and serving with the open-source MapBox toolkit, and we’ve got an interactive mapped timeline of Hurricane Irene, as told by Twitter.
We’re really excited we were able to contribute to GeoSprocket’s project and look forward to what they come up with in the future! Check out the interactive map of Hurricane Irene tweets made using the dataset here.
For those of you wondering why there are so few charts and visualizations in our product, it’s because we’re building our own visualization libraries. So that the data you’re mashing up and analyzing can be quickly summarized in unique ways that are also nice to look at. Here is a sneak peak at things to come.
The stacked area graph is a common chart in many programs. The concept is simple, the columns represent periods of time, while the colors represent one measure of value, and the area of the stacked shapes represents another.
Each stack (column) could be thought of as a phase of a project, while the horizontal stripes are some value being measured in that time.
We had a great time this week at what more than one person referred to as ‘the SXSW of the beltway’.
The venue for the events we attended, the Artisphere in Arlington, VA, was impressive with winding corridors and a creative floorplan. I learned that it used to be the old home of the Newseum before it relocated to where it is now in D.C.
The wizardry of iStrategy Labs was on display for any marketing or data nerd to geek out on…
I was on panel with Dan Morrison (Citizen Effect), Kate Stahnke (Causecast), and Justin Wredberg (Razoo).
The only let down was that I left wondering who this year’s corporate sponsor was…
…it shall remain a mystery.
We’re excited to be in Dakar, Senegal this weekend, presenting on the subject of big data to regional Civil Society and Governments. The event, organized by UNDP (the United Nation’s global development network), explores scalable solutions for holding governments accountable through data platforms:
Over the past decade, governance assessments have become increasingly important tools in Africa for monitoring whether governments are failing or succeeding in their commitments in legislation, government policies and international law. A workshop gathering civil society, development practitioners and research institutes will focus on civil society’s involvement in governance assessments and explore how these tools can better influence governance and policy processes, and hold governments accountable.
The three-day workshop in Dakar, Senegal, seeks to demonstrate, with specific tools and country experiences, how a more effective involvement by civil society in governance assessments, both as “producers” and “users” of governance data, can promote democratic governance through increased accountability and more inclusive participation.
We’ll be discussing our data visualization technologies as well as our APIs for mining text and imagery. We’re excited for the possibilities as well as to be among such esteemed company.
Our partner, Navanti Group, have taken our dataLayer API to scale, using it as part of an internal dashboard for monitoring emerging trends across social media conversations. Navanti specializes in providing analytical, programmatic, and technological services in various capacities. Their ambitious goal is to offer a system that identifies potential extremist actors and networks across public social media channels.
To do this effectively, Navanti’s team have to monitor hundreds of online feeds and websites, store that data, and make sense of it. metaLayer’s APIs help with this process by allowing their teams to contextualize, visualize and surface the most urgent patterns emerging from the dataset. Navanti’s OpenSEAS platform takes this information and makes it easy for their clients to dive in to the collected data easily.
Their platform is highly sophisticated, using dataLayer’s sentiment analysis and data structuring features in powerful ways. We’re extremely excited to see metaLayer APIs being tested at scale and for such a noble purpose.
