Declan Butler of the journal Nature, wrote an article about Swivel and IBM's Many Eyes in the March 1st, 2007 edition. You can read it on page 10 of the print edition or online here. From the article:
"I'm often frustrated by my inability to analyse in a different way data that are printed in peer-reviewed publications, when I'm interested in looking at a relationship that the authors didn't think of," [Brent Edwards, director of the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California] says. If research organizations and journals linked the raw data behind papers to social software tools such as Swivel and Many Eyes, he argues, "it would have considerable value to the scientific community as a whole".
UPDATE: as AlphaData pointed out in the comments to this post, there is a typo in the Nature article: there are more than a million data sets in the world that need to be set free and made more valuable, but we only have a few thousand of them currently at Swivel. Stay tuned though, with the passion folks have for data, we might get to a million in our life times.
Swivel Home
I've thought this for years and have heard other famous luminaries such as James Burke and Carl Sagan extol the same lament. The fact that we're locking up information and building economic walls to forbid other people from understanding what we know as a civilization is preventing progress. How many Einsteins have we prevented from existing by intellectually marginalizing wide swaths of the population?
Posted by: Tony Perrie | March 01, 2007 at 03:20 PM
Absolutely, Tony. Our mission is to make all that data more valuable and more accessible.
Posted by: Brian Mulloy | March 01, 2007 at 03:52 PM
It is clear that the author at Nature did not look at the offering at Swivel very closely- there are not 1000000 data sets but one Million charts -- very different Declan.
Posted by: AlphaData | March 07, 2007 at 09:09 PM
Thanks, AlphaData, for the comment about the typo in Nature. I updated the post to call out the mistake.
Posted by: Brian Mulloy | March 07, 2007 at 10:01 PM
Future plans for the new Nature Precedings - http://precedings.nature.com - include sharing of data sets and archiving of data sets in consumable by ways (by things like swivel!)
Posted by: Matt Jankowski | June 28, 2007 at 07:21 PM
cool, Matt. thanks.
Posted by: Brian Mulloy | June 29, 2007 at 12:11 AM