Open source data visualization and analysis for novice and experts.

Once Narrative Science had mastered the art of telling sports and finance stories, the company realized that it could produce much more than journalism. Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.

After realizing that turning data into stories presented an opportunity far larger than sports, the company changed its name to Automated Insights. “I used to put limitations on what we do, assuming our stories would be specific to data-rich industries,” founder Robbie Allen says. “Now I think ultimately the sky is the limit.”)


As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you’re going to replace writers with robots?

“I just looked at him,” Hammond recalls, “and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That’s the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.”

If there's one idea we want to leave you with about Linked Data, it's that the data is there to be used. Linked Data enables data to be opened up and connected so that people can build interesting new things from it. At TED, Berners-Lee described Linked Data as boxes of data that - when connected via open standards - enable things to sprout from it.