I'm interested in building a publically accessible system which details the budgets and spending of municipalities. I know a great deal about the technology. I've just been contacted by folks who do some of that for a living. It ought to be a blast. I think there would be a great deal of public interest in this. After all, it's trillions now...
I would appreciate any input you all might have for where this might take place now. I will investigate the difficult part which is to find out how to get the kind of software I know can make this possible, licensed and hosted. In the meantime I will putting together models and collecting data in MySQL.
Have you ever looked at Palo (www.palo.net) an open-source in-memory MOLAP server from German company Jedox. Different approach to ESSBase but this little product has gone from strength to strength over the last 3 or 4 years, and it's free!
Tom
Posted by: Tom Gleeson | December 09, 2008 at 01:00 PM
That looks very cool. I'll check it out. Ultimately, I'll want something that can support lots of users concurrently, but that's way down the path.
Posted by: M Bowen | December 09, 2008 at 03:33 PM
Michael, we should chat - I think we can build this out using aws and our cloud based platform. What is interesting is that Amazon has made some public databases available via S3. I can talk to my contacts there to see if we can get the municipal data hosted as well.
Posted by: Rohit Amarnath | December 09, 2008 at 09:13 PM