What is basic your idea of your initiative and what are you trying to accomplish with it? When was the first thought born about the project?
The main idea is to make a tool for visual exploration of social network data and to present this tool on Business Register data (because it really is a kind of social network). The first thought was born around august 2008 when my colleague and I decided to start working on this tool in our free time, just to see what we can get out of these Java technologies (we used JUNG, an open-source Java project by a couple of guys from the University of California).
How much time did it take to launch the project before it went live? What were the first reaction of the people?
At the beginning we thought that it will be ready in a few weeks/months but when we saw the data quality in Business register we decided to go deeper and implement data cleansing algorithms and other functionality. This and the fact, that it is not a commercial project (it was always balancing between all our free time activities) has caused that the beta version for public testing was released 18 months after start. But I think it was worth it, reactions are always very good, we can present some results which you can never see in any other relevant project or tool.
Did and how the idea change since Day1? What are your users saying and how are you adapting to their needs?
This tool is in never-ending development driven basically by our users. Every time we get an impulse from our user to add some functionality we begin to analyze this request and try to make it happen.
What are your plans for near and further future?
So the tool is evolving in time and now we are introducing Czech version (beta version herehttp://cz.vorsr.sk/index.html) and probably in two months we are looking to introduce a Czechoslovak version (one tool for analyzing joined Business registers of both countries). This could be the first European project which provides information from joined Business registers to public (and it’s completely free). And maybe I can ask you something: Is there any similar project in Poland? Or is there a free Business register page (like government page) which can provide us with information about companies and person relations? Maybe in further future we add Poland Business Register also :)
What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running your project?
The biggest obstacle is probably poor data quality in the Business Register (I already wrote about this issue). We tried to make this tool without downloading the data to our databases, so in Slovak it runs as an online wrapper of Business register. This approach has its positives (like no problem with request limit and always up to date data) but recently we discovered that this approach has some limits which we want to overcome. This limit is mainly the data loading time and stability of the Business Register, which is continuously getting worse. Even though we like the concept of using government services as data sources for our tool, we have to face the fact that these services has a long road to go before they can be used in such way.
Was there anyone pissed off at you after you launched this project? :) Some "businessmen"?
I think that people still don’t get it what they can do with this tool. Most of our users just look at their own business and do not go deeper. Partly it’s our fault because we don’t pay much attention to promotion of results yet. But we are going to change that and embed some introduction (tutorial) videos and results showing videos in our home page. Then I can imagine that some businessman would be pissed off that we used his case to present our tool. But in general I think there’s nothing to be worried about, it’s all public data already accessible through public Business Register.
Do you have any movie explaining or showing how this project works?
As I said, this would be ready in couple of days, probably at the end of this week. I will send you a link then.
What new will be in beta version?
Beta version in completely new inside. There was some major object and internal structure redesign, which will improve stability, speed of the applet and will allow us to easily integrate other countries and add other sources information. Also some GUI redesign and new graph analyzing algorithms. So it will be quite new at the end, but we talk about horizon of probably one year.
I find this currently hard to use - lots of Java, its quiet slow in my browser. Don’t you loose user because of it?
I know that Java is source consuming and therefore the whole tool is slower in browser with large amount of data loaded but this tool was never meant to be used this way. It was designed to be a small applet for visualizing small graph online loaded from Business Register. When we saw that big business cases are really big and you have to load very large graph to see the context we decided to make a real tool from it. The first step to overcome the speed issue was enabling to install it as a desktop application which is running faster. Another step is to release new version with optimized algorithms (beta version mentioned earlier). But at the end, it will never be a click-and-see component for everyone, it’s a tool and when a user wants to use it he/she has to accept its demands.
What are the promotional plans? Do media use it?
We don’t have information whether any media use it. I think that there are some media people among our users but that’s all. I have to say that we underestimated the value of promotion. We are mainly programmers but we have to face the fact that every project needs a promotion plan.
Is there any business person who wants to sponsor you? :)
This goes hand in hand with the question before I think. No promotion means no sponsor. On the other hand we are getting promo support from the Fair-play Alliance in Slovak Republic and now also from people of the Kohovolit.eu portal in Czech Republic for which we are very thankful.