Thinking Clearly .

We’re big baseball fans around here, and if you were in our office, you’d frequently find us debating various baseball topics, such as whether or not Jeff Bagwell had a Hall of Fame career, or lamenting about the sad state of the Orioles franchise. So it was just a matter of time until our interests at work collided with our love of the national pastime and yielded our latest demo of jSpace over a data set near and dear to our hearts, baseball statistics.

Retrosheet is a great site for baseball statistics, they have a very comprehensive database of stats for nearly every game played dating back to about 1870. We’ve used this site in the past to settle more than a few debates. One of the great things about Retrosheet is that they provide a dump of their data, which we scraped into RDF and loaded into Sesame. It’s about 7.1M triples and contains all the season stats (pitching, batting and fielding) for all the players in their database who played between 1871 and 2006. That’s nearly 17000 players, from Hank Aaron to Ryan Zimmerman and everyone in between. It also includes all relevant associated team, league and position data.

We’ve created a model file for this data and hooked it up to jSpace for browsing, and it makes for a very cool demo—in fact, we think it’s probably gone beyond a demo and is a nearly-useful tool for sabermetricians, baseball stats junkies, etc.

Under the assumption you’re looking for a player, our model contains columns for all relevant statistics in the database, as well as some calculated ones, such as Slugging %, Runs Created or Zone Rating. You can very easily find all first basemen who played for any of the Baltimore Orioles franchises (there are several) who have hit more than 200 homeruns in their career and have a lifetime batting average of .280 or better, all it takes is a few clicks in jSpace’s interface. Maybe you don’t care what franchise they played for, no problem. You’re just a click away from finding all players that meet those criteria, except for the franchise for which they played.

To make the demo possible, we’ve added some new features to jSpace. Among the new features is support for custom UI’s for columns containing typed literals. So in the case of our baseball demo, the homeruns column, which is full of integer values, now gives you the option to restrict your search using numerical operations such as greater than or less than. If a column contains date entries, you can specify that you’re looking for things before or after a certain date. And you can even set the granularity of a column of numbers, so rather than showing ALL the homerun values, you can display them in buckets of 10 or 100, narrowing down the results in a column from potentially hundreds to just a handful. The custom column UI support is extensible, so it would be easy to make new column view’s, such a map for geographic data, or a calendar for date values rather than a list.

We’ve also added a new Information Panel component called the “Web View” which simply takes the current selected resource and shows a web page relevant to that selection. We provide out of the box support for Wikipedia and Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” searches. So in our baseball demo, when you select “First Base” from the list of positions, the web view will show wikipedia’s entry on first basemen. When you select a player, you’ll see Retrosheet’s player data page. The web view brings more information about what you are browsing right to your fingertips.

We think these new features and a very cool data set make for a great demo of jSpace and we invite you over to check it out. Just browse to the jSpace page and scroll down to the bottom of the page where we list the demo’s and click on the link to launch the jSpace baseball demo.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 2:37 pm and is filed under SemWeb, jSpace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.