HN Explorer

16 comments

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maxdemarzi
Nice... feels a bit like the Gremlin shell. What's the tech behind this website?
kemvi
The idea is that you'd use this via the python shell (and soon, from your R code or Javascript code), and not through the website. Looks like we need to make that clearer. The website stack is Postgres+Django+Python.
maxdemarzi
How interconnected is your data? Did you consider a graph db?
kemvi
It's highly interconnected. For example, you can make hops like USCounty--USState--Senator--Vote on economic stimulus bill.

The data backend is indeed NoSQL, but we didn't choose a graph db because there are no really good graph solutions that are easily parallelized.

PabloOsinaga
Can you elaborate a bit further on the data you have? Is it a flexible architecture where you plugin data from multiple sources? How do you solve ETL for that? Or is it a fixed data set? If so, what is it?
kemvi
Currently, it's great for socioeconomic data on countries, as well as for high-res socioeconomic data for the US (county resolution). There's data from the World Bank, Dept of Health, Dept of Labor, Dept of Justice, and several other public sources, with all entities reconciled.

We're building a pipeline to make it so that ETL involves as little human time as possible, but it's in its early stages now.

govnapoesh
>>> kemvi.entity("japan") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/kemvi/__init__.py", line 232, in entity ret.append(Entity(item)) TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'popularity'
kemvi
Thanks, it's fixed -- that shouldn't have slipped through testing.
tectonic
Any chance of a Ruby API?
kemvi
Coming soon, along with R and Javascript!
haskell_curry
Are you guys hiring? This looks like a lot of fun to work on.
kemvi
Not yet, but drop us a line at info@kemvi.com.
websymphony
How do you get list of properties that a given entity supports?
kemvi
You can't get a complete list the way it's currently set up. But SomeEntity.property(), without an argument, will give you a sample of them.
Stwerner
This is awesome. Are you planning on adding more diverse data sets beyond government and economic? Something like professional sports stats, college sports stats, etc?
kemvi
If there were canonical sports stats data sources to include, it wouldn't be difficult. Email us at info@kemvi.com if there's something specific you have in mind.