A Taste of What is To Come

In my last blog post, I said that this blog would focus on "Structured Data". This is a pretty loose term and I apologize ahead of time. A friend of mine even took my lack of definition to "comment" about his organic coffee business. Perhaps I should have used the term "Relational Data". The data I deal with in my "travels" will have many of the following properties:

• Related records have a common structure (example: the phone book)
• Nearly always includes numbers, dollar amounts, or other quantitative fields that are common to every row of data
• One or more common elements between two different sets of structured data
  

Why is this important? I want to be able to come to conclusions , plain and simple, based on data, common sense, and other facts that I can bring in from the web. And if we can have a little "fun" in the process with witty observations and comments from the peanut gallery, all the better.

I encourage readers to go to http://data.octo.dc.gov/ to see an example of data that I might explore in the future. This is the District of Columbia government data site. For example, you can get a spreadsheet that has all of the reported crimes and their lattitude and longitude coordinates. This type of data is very easy to dump into excel and manipulate for just about any purpose ... Or maybe you use the locations and dump those into a Google mapping tool to help you decide which hotel to NOT stay at the next you are in Washington on business ;-) Also note that they didn't provide an automatic mapping of their crime data like they did for other data sources (now why is that?).

Hope this gives you a taste for what will come in the near future when we travel the world of data.

IBrakeForData