Tiny Data: Rapid development with Elasticsearch by Leslie Hawthorn.
From the post:
Today we’re pleased to bring you the story of the creation of SeeMeSpeak, a Ruby application that allows users to record gestures for those learning sign language. Florian Gilcher, one of the organizers of the Berlin Elasticsearch User Group participated in a hackathon last weekend with three friends, resulting in this brand new open source project using Elasticsearch on the back end. (Emphasis in original.)
Project:
Sadly, there are almost no good learning resources for sign language on the internet. If material is available, licensing is a hassle or both the licensing and the material is poorly documented. Documenting sign language yourself is also hard, because producing and collecting videos is difficult. You need third-party recording tools, video conversion and manual categorization. That’s a sad state in a world where every notebook has a usable camera built in!
Our idea was to leverage modern browser technologies to provide an easy recording function and a quick interface to categorize the recorded words. The result is SeeMeSpeak.
Two lessons here:
- Data does not have to be “big” in order to be important.
- Browsers are very close to being the default UI for users.