Comments on: Dabble DB: Still sadly short of structured Shangri-La

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 02:19:07 +0000

Thanks for the offer, Dae, but Kurt beat you to it—I’ve been having a blast wiring up types & topics all afternoon.

By: Dae Park

Dae Park — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:46:03 +0000

Thank you for your interest in Freebase. Shoot me an email and I will send an invite.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:05:21 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Avi. I was hoping that my quick case study would be useful to you guys (and others working in the same area).

Your comments about public-facing views make sense, considering the origins of the product. Even so, when I was putting in sample data, I kept assuming that there was a much less cluttered view that made it easy to see your information when you weren't in the process of editing, without all the extra fields and editing controls. If a data set is truly useful, whether public or private, you'll likely end up with a disproportionate number of users that simply want to view & explore it without making changes.

My comments about the states or country codes were trying to express my sense of surprise that the finest level of location granularity that Dabble DB offered was state/province, and only in North America, at that! (The fact that the map view only showed a state map of the US reinforced that impression.) Without more fine-grained detail, the KML feed is going to be of limited usefulness.

In addition, the KML feed for my sample data appears to be a network link rather than containing the data itself, which means that if I feed it to Google Maps I don't get anything useful. (To be sure, this is partly a limitation of Google Maps, but a non-network-link KML is more useful to non-Earth consumers.)

As for not being able to use the Google Maps API, they offer the same terms as Dabble DB (free if your application is free), so it should at least be usable for the Creative Commons version. I don't know that much about the enterprise maps pricing, so I'm curious to hear more about what makes it impractical for you guys.

Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to listen; hopefully these will all turn out to be temporary problems, and I'll be able to recommend Dabble DB without reservation in the future.

By: Avi Bryant

Avi Bryant — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 06:47:16 +0000

Joe, thanks for the kind words and the valuable feedback on Dabble DB. The shortcomings you mention are real, and we're aware of them and working on them. I take your point about "a box of yellowing printouts" especially to heart: to begin with, Dabble was designed under the assumption that nearly everyone working with the data would be part of a single workgroup and be a registered user with full interactive access to the data. With Dabble DB Commons, we're experimenting with more public-facing models, but the technology is still playing catch-up.

One small clarification about our location support: the choice between US States and ISO Country Codes is simply a necessary disambiguation, since both use two-letter abbreviations, often without any other context. We do recognize more than just those two sets of locations. And we will certainly be providing full lat/long support in the future. (Unforunately, due to their pricey commercial licensing, just "dumping it into Google Maps" isn't as simple as it sounds - but note that we do already have a KML export for viewing data in Google Earth).

Thanks again for the feedback, Avi