Video of Needle in Action

Written by Justin Boyan Friday, 18 June 2010 16:18

We've completed the first of several planned videos that show the Needle platform in action! In this video, we use Needle to collect and merge a small database of tourist attractions, step-by-step:

1. Define a simple data model for tourist attractions.
2. "Tag" a website and a spreadsheet to collect their data.
3. Merge and deduplicate the combined data.
4. View the data in a table, in Excel, and on a map.

The video takes just 9 minutes to show all these steps. In real life, the data collection for the Nebraska state tourism website took another 5 minutes not shown in the video, so by following these steps, you can create a useful online database from multiple sources in about a quarter hour—with no programming required!  Take a look and let us know what you think.