Thanks for the encouragement... being impressed with the demo is ultimately what matters.
A serious problem I have however is that this geography database isn't so interesting. Who is really going to learn anything from this rather low quality database? What I am looking for is some database that is: 1.) complex enough to preclude standard forms interfaces and 2.) contains information worth asking about. Not an easy task to identify, obtain such data sources.
I was thinking maybe a sports scores database or something...
I wouldn't discount your product's usefulness for simple datasets. As a UX guy I'd love to see this put toward a better ecommerce search/browse -- "Desk chairs between $150 and $225".
I see it augmenting the standard facet-filter style browse. For example http://nymag.com/restaurants/: I enter "indian food in the east village" -- your product helps pre-arrange the facet filters for me, but I can still add a price range or another neighborhood to the query through standard UI.
The obvious benefit is that natural language browse offers quick access to complex queries (within the user's mental model). But if the results are presented well, your product can be used to train the user to understand the mapping between natural language and executable query (and in that way inform their mental model).
If that means that some users only need to use the natural language feature a few times (before switching to standard UI), it's still successful.
"Sorry, but 'what's the biggest city in the us?' is not understood by the system.
The system does not understand what the word ''s' means."
Which was disappointing.
2. Next up:
does portland have a bigger population than seattle?
Response:
Sorry, but 'does portland have a bigger population than seattle?' is not understood by the system.
The system does not understand what the word 'bigger' means.
Boo. Also the word 'system' has no meaning to ordinary people, and only vague meaning for the rest of us.
3. Have you considered using a greater dataset for a better demo? Ie, police crimes, or CC data from wikipedia?
4. Show us what you can do on the front page. I don't give a damn about your sepia toned dude writing on a blackboard, or your brown colored optical fibre stock image, or that you, like everyone else, intends to be the prime supplier of whatever the hell it is you do.
Tjena!
This sounds like it would be useful for me (haven't tried the demos since the server is down) but I have a pretty big and messy set of astrophysics simulation data that I'd like to be able to query. I doubt you'll get much traction from the public with that as a demo, though... ;-)
Yes. These are exactly the kind of questions that the system can support. There is a big baseball database out there that I played around with earlier (http://baseball1.com/). It's only for non-commercial activities the last I checked.
