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Keshif, a web-based tool that lets you browse and understand datasets easily (keshif.me)
93 points by StreamBright on March 7, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



Interesting demo but it seems very busy or visually dense. I like the examples that have less information or even the same on a bigger canvas. Looking at who funded it since it was done by Huawei they probably wanted that .


Love the name; in Turkish it means "discovery"


The author of the project is Turkish (this is his PhD research project at UMD - http://adilyalcin.me/)


>Keshif will present your data in its effective visual design

What criteria does it use to decide which visual design pattern to use?


Yeeesh...I consider myself experienced with data but that console confused me greatly...I imagine it doesn't do well with less ideal datasets. I think Tableau is probably the more appropriate, general purpose data exploration tool...and I say that as someone who doesn't really know how to use Tableau (I'd say Tableau is the first piece of software that I've decided that I'm not patient/smart enough to learn).


Given your background in computational journalism (and teaching students to use python) I'm curious what you find difficult about Tableau?


I think it's about as difficult as it needs to be...in that it purports to be an interactive visualization builder that also serves as a self-hosted visualization player, as well as a kind of database/spreadsheet hybrid (or at least, a hookup between those kinds of things)...for non-technical users who need all of those things, all at once...Tableau is probably the best solution. But I usually only need one of those things at a time...or, that's how I approach my data problems: work with it in SQL/Excel and export into a portable format (i.e. JSOn or CSV) that a data visualization tool can make do with, whether that data viz tool is just, well, Excel, or ggplot2, or D3, if I need a web interactive. And I know how to upload/host my own web content.

So Tableau is difficult because it's an all-in-one package with a lot of moving parts...and I rarely need all of those moving parts. While I don't use Tableau myself, I know many people who do, and generally they use it because they don't know how to do web things, period...i.e. Tableau's web charts "just work", once you learn how to build them.

Of course, "just works" is a moving target in this day of responsive web and AMP and non-Web platforms (i.e. Facebook Instant Articles)...media publications that produce Tableau viz are going to have to find a workaround, or hope that Tableau continues to innovate in making their viz packages portable.


No matter what kind of local file I upload, whether JSON or CSV, it warns me that it is not supported.


You're using JSON v3.2, I'll bet. You need to upgrade to the latest version.


How does this compare to Kibana/Grafana?




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