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As for your latter suggestion - I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution. As you are describing it, you would essentially be hosting R, som

As for your latter suggestion - I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution. As you are describing it, you would essentially be hosting R, some visualization tool, and a scripting tool. That's absurd enough and doesn't even address the bandwidth issue - these datasets are usually huge. You'd be better off writing enterprise software in this field. Especially considering anyone who would pay for data munging and visualization tools/services probably doesn't want their data out on the internet.

neilc 17y ago
I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution Maybe not a perfectly "general" solution, but there are lots of domains where data is analyzed that would benefit from a powerful web-based analytic environment. these datasets are usually huge Not all interesting datasets are huge. Some large data sets can easily be shared among users -- Amazon already hosts a lot of common data sets in EC2 already, for example. Given the steadily-decreasing cost of bandwidth and the fact that you don't need interactive response (at least for the initial data load), I don't think it's that impractical for a pretty wide set of scenarios.
vbar 17y ago
Hosting R is already implemented - see http://predict.i2pi.com/ http://predict.i2pi.com/
- jimbokun 17y ago
  Yes, this looks a lot like what I had in mind. Reading his blog entry, I like that he is getting something out there, even though it is not all of what he originally had in mind. If he keeps iterating, he should do well. I wonder if he has any thoughts on business models.
jimbokun 17y ago
"As for your latter suggestion - I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution." Might be a dual product strategy, the public facing webapp with limits on data size to test drive, and customer site installed enterprise version. Or maybe some solution that uses Amazon storage (in other words, outsource data storage and security issues to Amazon). Of course, Google had the two tier search idea (they wanted to monetize by selling custom search servers to businesses) but found the real money was to be made on the consumer facing side. So you never know.
paulsb 17y ago
I think there is a need and place for it. One of the things I am hoping to do with my start-up is to build simple tools to help wet-lab scientists access informatics solutions to analyse and visualise their data, and simple tools for informatics scientists to visualise their data so that a wet-lab scientist can understand it (more easily). There is a huge communication gap between (bio)wet-lab and (bio)informaticians, and I think 'data science' tools can help to bridge that gap.

neilc 17y ago

I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution Maybe not a perfectly "general" solution, but there are lots of domains where data is analyzed that would benefit from a powerful web-based analytic environment. these datasets are usually huge Not all interesting datasets are huge. Some large data sets can easily be shared among users -- Amazon already hosts a lot of common data sets in EC2 already, for example. Given the steadily-decreasing cost of bandwidth and the fact that you don't need interactive response (at least for the initial data load), I don't think it's that impractical for a pretty wide set of scenarios.

vbar 17y ago

Hosting R is already implemented - see http://predict.i2pi.com/ http://predict.i2pi.com/

jimbokun 17y ago
Yes, this looks a lot like what I had in mind. Reading his blog entry, I like that he is getting something out there, even though it is not all of what he originally had in mind. If he keeps iterating, he should do well. I wonder if he has any thoughts on business models.

jimbokun 17y ago

"As for your latter suggestion - I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution." Might be a dual product strategy, the public facing webapp with limits on data size to test drive, and customer site installed enterprise version. Or maybe some solution that uses Amazon storage (in other words, outsource data storage and security issues to Amazon). Of course, Google had the two tier search idea (they wanted to monetize by selling custom search servers to businesses) but found the real money was to be made on the consumer facing side. So you never know.

paulsb 17y ago

I think there is a need and place for it. One of the things I am hoping to do with my start-up is to build simple tools to help wet-lab scientists access informatics solutions to analyse and visualise their data, and simple tools for informatics scientists to visualise their data so that a wet-lab scientist can understand it (more easily). There is a huge communication gap between (bio)wet-lab and (bio)informaticians, and I think 'data science' tools can help to bridge that gap.