Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 27, 2011

Zanran

Filed under: Data Source,Dataset,Search Engines — Patrick Durusau @ 12:36 pm

Zanran

A search engine for data and statistics.

I was puzzled by results containing mostly PDF files until I read:

Zanran doesn’t work by spotting wording in the text and looking for images – it’s the other way round. The system examines millions of images and decides for each one whether it’s a graph, chart or table – whether it has numerical content.

Admittedly you may have difficulty re-using such data but finding it is a big first step. You can then contact the source for the data in a more re-usable form.

From Hints & Helps:

Language. English only please… for now.
Phrase search. You can use double quotes to make phrases (e.g. “mobile phones”).
Vocabulary. We have only limited synonyms – please try different words in your query. And we don’t spell-check … yet.

From the website:

Zanran helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts.

Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data.

Well said.

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