Take a look at Timetric and MaterialsGrid

From Sean McGrath’s blog:

Some time ago, I had some ideas burning a hole in my head. Ideas I knew I had no time to pursue but felt pretty passionate about. My Two Django ideas in need of good homes posting resulted in some meetings and some false starts…but it also resulted in meeting up with three ace Django/Python programmers / “recovering” scientists, based in the fine city of Cambridge, UK. Three of the smartest folks I’ve ever met to boot.
It took me all of, uh, 20 seconds to explain one of the ideas to them and the result, a mere matter of months later is http://timetric.com/. it is now in public beta and you might like to check it out.
The idea is simple but has significant consequences in my opinion
The basic thought is this: What if numbers were first class members of the Web ecosystem?…

• What if numeric quantities had their own “home” on the Web? I don’t mean a great big slab of numbers, or a database, I mean the actual numeric quantities themselves : the time it takes you to drive to work, the spot price of gold, the average daily rainfall in Tanna Tuva…whatever.
• What if the changes to those quantities are recorded through time? You would end up with a time series for each numeric quantity.
• What if each time series was a blog, with its own feeds, its own simple web based update mechanism etc?
• What if all these numeric blogs lived out in the cloud so that it can scale to silly numbers and provide very high availabilty?
• What if the entire system provided simple webby APIs so that developers can upload as well as download stuff easily?
• And last but definitely not least…what if new time series could be created using spreadsheet like formulae – and automatically updated when any of the underlying numeric quantities are updated.

That would be pretty interesting. Not a database on the web, not a spreadsheet on the Web. Something new and much more interesting on the Web.
It will be fascinating to see what types of applications get built on top of the Timetric platform.

The “three ace Django/Python programmers” are Toby White, Dan Wilson and Andrew Walkingshaw, with whom I worked for the last 3-4 years. Martin Dove, from Earth Sciences and Victor Milman from Accelrys conceived a project for automatically computing the properties of crystalline materials and roped in DTI, Frankfurt, IBM and Daresbury. The project (sadly) finished late last year.

Although we had tried to keep them on in various roles, last September the three aces told us that they were leaving to set up a company – it was very hush-hush and it was only a month or so ago that Andrew visited us and demoed what they were doing. It’s a novel idea and – as with all new web ideas – it’s impossible to predict how it will develop.

I resonate with “numbers having their home on the web”. The scientific semantic web will only come about when we can use numbers as easily as we use words. It’s remarkable how far words have taken us – we can use search engines to find words and phrases that describe many concepts but not numbers. We can’t ask Google (or Live Search) “find all countries with a population over 100 million”. And that’s only the first step. It’s important to have units of measurement “average temperature greater than 40” is not much use.

So Timetrics is a first step. It’s a specialised type of numeric info and it relies on people having created it in that form already. So I want it to be successful, both as a pointer to the future and also as something that I can feel I had a small part in. An important role of academia is to generate new forms of knowledge and – in many cases – those will turn out to be able to create wealth.

[And by the way, they also hack Fortran.]