Show HN: dstack.ai – publish, track, and share data visualizations
dstack.aiHi HN,
I am Riwaj from dstack.ai. dstack.ai offers a convenient way to publish, share, and track data visualizations, analysis results, and data reports.
In our experience, as of now, many data analysts and data scientists work through the data in various tools such as excel, Jupyter notebook, etc. and then share the graphic with their peers, managers or clients using local network drives or emails in the form of PDFs or PowerPoints. There is also a growing number of users and teams who use BI Tools, Tableau, Superset or build custom applications to organize interactive dashboards and reports. When it comes to tracking the visualizations or analyzing results, some teams resort to work around methods such as printing the result in a document and then using version control tools over the document. In summary, there are a variety of tools available for exploring, tracking and sharing reports, but many of these allow to publish reports generated by their own tools thus allowing for very little flexibility for a team that works with multiple programming languages, tools, and plotting libraries.
We at dstack.ai have built a light-weight solution where you can publish the data visualizations via APIs from anywhere (a Jupyter notebook, a script or an application) and store them in our web application (which is also mobile friendly) for collaboration with teams and clients, i.e., you can share the published charts via URL and comment on each stored chart (think of Instagram). Our current version supports Python and R as programming languages, and Matplotlib, Ggplot2, Plotly and Bokeh as plotting libraries. In our first version, we only support static charts and basic interactive charts, i.e., if you stored charts with certain parameters, the users who browse through those charts can play with only those specific parameter values.
We think there is a lot more one can offer to improve the current process of a collaborative exploration of data visualization for teams. As basic as our current solution is, we are currently working on releasing new features such as - Organizing the charts into dashboards - User groups and permission management - Plugins for spreadsheets such as Google docs and MS Excel - Dynamic plots and dashboard that fetches data from a data source and can be scheduled to update regularly - A mobile application to access the visualizations, - On-prem options
We would love to hear about your challenges in the area of collaboration around data visualization, and receive any feedback on what we currently have. For your reference, here is the documentation for product usage. https://docs.dstack.ai
DataViz-as-a-service?
Hi shail619, the service we offer is currently tailored for collaboration on data visualizations. We hope that our current solution bridges the two parties that work with data reports - those who produce it and those who use it to make business decisions. In the future, we aim to extend our service to other kinds of data services around data science and data engineering.
Actually, thinking about it more, it sounds more like a marketplace.. a market place that brings together the dataviz producers and consumers.. ebay for data viz of sorts almost
So it's plot.ly, but costs money?
Oh I see you have a dot-ai domain. Very cool.
Hi, a co-founder here. My name is Andrey. Actually, Plotly is our source of inspiration in a way. However, I think, the problem we are trying to solve lies a different direction. Just a few points to show how we are different: 1. We would like to support Plotly as one of the plot libraries (which is super great by the way). In addition we'd like to support many other libraries – anything that the user is using, incl. ggplot2, Matplotlib, Bokeh, etc. 2. We would like to combine the approaches Plotly offers in two different products (Chart Studio and Dash) into one and simplify the process of reporting data and the process of organizing dashboards. 3. Ideally, we'd like to help companies also organize and simplify their security around accessing the data. 4. We'd like to help build dashboards easier – by eliminating the needs of development entirely.
Just also want to mention, that our current offering and all other basic functionality that we will add, such as permission control, dashboards, etc will remain free. Anyway, it's just a start for us to really learn what our potential customers and users are doing and build that things that are currently missing – not blindly copying anyone's features. Having said that, I'd still like to thank you for your feedback. In case you have an idea of how we can help your teams collaborate around data, please let me know andrey at dstack.ai