data mining for oil sources

November 17, 2008

Jon Udell writes about where the US gets its oil (the majority comes from Canada, not the middle east). He follows the data with the story of how he discovered the answer and presented the data using DabbleDB.

I agree with Jon when he says “we’re really close to the point where non-specialists will be able to find data online, ask questions of it, produce answers that bear on public policy issues, and share those answers online for review and discussion.” It’ll likely need another generation of tools before we work out the glitches and hiccups in the data flow and it’ll require the generation who grew up with the web to expect such tools at their fingertips and put them to use. I look forward to seeing what comes next.

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