Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation. Parallax uses faceted navigation to make it easy to jump from one set of data to another related set of data and see the underlying connections.

David’s demo gets the idea across best:

I spent some time using Parallax to explore the influence node on Freebase, which attempts to capture the influences of notable people (and has led to some fun apps). Here are some of James Joyce’s biggest influences, mapped by place of birth:

Anyone who’s spent time puzzling over Finnegans Wake knows that Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher/historian/rhetorician/etymologist/jurist whom Joyce said made his imagination grow. But who influenced Vico? Here’s a timeline of those responsible:

There’s more to explore where that came from.

Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle word clouds we see all too often. They have a blessedly simple API as well.

ReadTheStimulus.org has made the full text of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (House Stimulus Bill) searchable with comments for each page enabled. Actual dollar appropriations from the bill have been parsed out by volunteers and entered into a Google spreadsheet. Their tagline says it all: “$850 Billion, 941 pages, and counting… somebody needs to read it!”

The Legislative Lookup API from Mobile Commons is a database that matches latitude and longtitude with the U.S. congressional and state legislators for that location. Could be put to good use in your pet mapping application. They even made it available as a standalone Rails app.

Represent from The New York Times is the kind of application you could use the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API for. It’s a nice way for New Yorkers to find their elected representatives and see what they’re up to.

The New York Times Congress API is what actually powers Represent (Represent!). The great thing about it is that it was built to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can use it with the seven-character code used to identify members of Congress in the official Biographical Directory, or the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack to individual member responses.

DC Bikes is another example of a good local application, mapping bike routes, bike thefts and bike-related Craiglist postings for Washington, D.C. bikers. It uses the same Mapnik toolkit EveryBlock uses to get their nice maps. Built by Development Seed for the D.C. Data Catalog‘s Apps for Democracy competition.

iLive.at also came out of Apps for Democracy. Enter a Washington, D.C. address and receive information tailored to that location and organized into categories like Errands, Emergencies, Recently Reported Crimes, People, Transportation and “Did You Know?” I would love to see a New York version.

You can keep up with all the action in this space on the Open Government, PoliParse and Sunlight Labs Google Groups.

Good data on micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship around the world is hard to come by. There’s the World Bank’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Database, but it has more caveats than a prescription drug commercial. Different governments operating in different economies at different stages of development have different definitions for these things. The 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey comes close, “striving to define a unit of measurement, source of information, and concept of entrepreneurship applicable and available among the diverse countries surveyed.” This limits it to the “formal sector”—small companies registered with their governments—as opposed to the informal sector, like most sellers on Etsy. Still, it’s of some interest. Above, a screenshot of the Many Eyes bubble chart version of some of the data, with nations sized according to “new business density,” or the density of new registered companies per 1,000 citizens. New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, the UK and the Netherlands round out the top five. See the same data on a map here.

See also: Etsy and the World Economic Forum.

Lauren got the search functionality for Datamob up and running, making the site about 1,000 times more useful. Adjustments are in progress but you can subscribe to feeds of search results.

Recent additions: NPR API, BBC Backstage, CrunchBase API, CrunchBase Map, TheMiddleClass.org, geophysically scaled economic data, Walk Score, Lee Byron’s San Franscisco Walkability Map, Toby Segaran’s Industry Browser and a number of resources.

NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people, and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band who have had asteroids named after them, then overlay their zodiac signs. Or see which big-name donors have contributed to the campaigns of both Obama and McCain. Fun stuff though I would love to be able to use this on top of other data sources.

See also: TheyRule, ExxonSecrets

• usa
  26
  (52%)
• government
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• maps
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• language
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• business
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  (14%)

Recent blips: interactive Voronoi treemaps, basketball data visualizations, Watchdog.net.

Datamob-compliant APIs: MAPLight, GovTracker, AMEE, Project Vote Smart, Civic Footprint.

Coffee table: The Alphabet Abecedarium, Mashups, Miscellany.

I always want to know where these sites get their data, and as I dug deeper I noticed that many of them pull from the same data sources. Open Secrets from the Center for Responsive Politics is an important data source—Follow the Oil Money, OpenCongress and MAPLight all tap into it in different ways. Datamob aims to highlight these connections and keep track of all the developer-friendly public data sources and corresponding interfaces. We’ve got feeds of everything (datasets, interfaces, resources, tags, comments, the whole ball of data) to help with that.

The site was built with Rails in coffee shops around New York City using Heroku, an amazing web-based, collaborative Rails development environment. Get the full WTF on the about page. We’re just getting started and there’s a lot more to come.