Show HN: Semantic programmatic search for computable data | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Semantic programmatic search for computable data

kemvi.com

24 pointskemvi16 comments

>>> 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'

Thanks, it's fixed -- that shouldn't have slipped through testing.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Nice... feels a bit like the Gremlin shell. What's the tech behind this website?

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.

How interconnected is your data? Did you consider a graph db?

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.

How do you get list of properties that a given entity supports?

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.

Are you guys hiring? This looks like a lot of fun to work on.

Not yet, but drop us a line at info@kemvi.com.

Any chance of a Ruby API?

Coming soon, along with R and Javascript!

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