Swivel – Users Upload and Share Data

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I’ve been checking out Swivel this morning and I have to say I’m excited. A friend described it best when he said it looks like a YouTube for data. Its so easy to add data and start using it.

Step 1: I loaded the career stats for Orlando Cepeda. I used the web query tool in MS Excel to import the data into a Excel workbook and then saved the data out as a CSV to import into Swivel.

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Step 2: You then can preview the data to make sure it imported in correctly.

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Step 3: You then can set the field types and unit of measure.

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Step 4: Describe the data you have uploaded, where you got it, give it a picture (from Flickr, but you can choose anyplace later)

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Step 5: Explore your data that you’ve uploaded

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The graphs are not too bad and you can even embed them on your webpage like this:

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Of course not everyone enjoys baseball as much as I do, but you can compare any other uploaded data via graph such as Per Capita Income vs. Unleaded Regular Gas Price

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I’m as excited about Swivel as I was about Zillow. I can only imagine where this will lead as uploading and working with your data and data of others is just so simple. YouTube for data is right.

About James Fee
Chief Evangelist for WeoGeo.com

3 Responses to Swivel – Users Upload and Share Data

  1. Frank says:

    So how can I use this data in my existing applications? I don’t see an API yet.

  2. visnu says:

    actually, for data input and output, we _started_ with an api amazingly. it got to be too unwieldy, especially in the beginning when we were trying all sorts of different ideas. it’ll be back, i promise.

    visnu
    swivel engineer person

  3. Pingback: Swivel did have an API at James Fee GIS Blog