Hi there! I’m Andrew Walkingshaw, and – amongst other things – I’m responsible for helping you to find the data you’re looking for on Timetric.
That means two things, really; I build ways for you to find the data already in Timetric, and I find and upload new sources of data which we think you might be interested in. I’m going to write about the first of these today, but if there’s data out there which you’d like us to get, leave us a suggestion on our Get Satisfaction site and we’ll see what we can do.
Anyway, about finding data. If you’ve used sites like Flickr or Delicious, then Timetric’s going to feel pretty familiar – like them, we use search and tagging to help you get to the data you’re after.
When you log into Timetric, the first thing you see is your dashboard.
Dashboard
Any nuggets you’re watching appear in here. Up in the top right hand corner, though, there’s a search box; if you type something in there and hit “Search”, then you get back a page of search results.
Search results
I searched for “bond” here, and I’ve got back a page of information about bond prices. Let’s say I’m not interested in data from Moody’s: if I search for “bond -Moody”, then I can exclude them from the search results.
Search results for "bond -Moody"
Under each of these search results, you can see a list of tags (in light grey). When you upload data, you can give a list of tags to remember it by – categories, more or less. A lot of the data here comes from the UK National Statistics dataset from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/, and we’ve tagged that “National Statistics” – so if you click on that tag:
… then you get back a list of everything tagged with that tag – for this dataset, about 2000 pages worth! So you’ll need to be able to filter that. From this page, you can filter by another tag – the most common tags found alongside the ones you’re filtering by are listed at the top of the page. Let’s filter by “monthly”:
Multi-tag filters
We’re based in Cambridge, about an hour away from London, so I’m most interested in what’s going on in the south of England. I can search within these results by typing “south” into the search box there.
Tagging and searching together
So you can use tags and searching together to find the data you’re interested in. If there’s something you’re looking for which you can’t find, though, let us know and we’ll try and help you out.
