Atlas – a platform for charts and data

https://www.theatlas.com/

by uptown • 10 years ago

222 63 10 years ago

d--b2• 10 years ago

Can someone who upvoted comment on what this is supposed to do? I searched `car sales in Europe` and the first chart I got is `new startups valued at 1bn or more`

germanier• 10 years ago

It seems like these are the (manually created) charts used in qz.com articles.

soneca• 10 years ago

I searched 'hostels in the world' and got "sugary drinks can kill" and "Fanya's rare metal bubble: Indium prices since 2011".

cpsempek• 10 years ago

I searched "tsla" and "tsla price" (and again "aapl" and "aapl price"). The first gave me more or less what I was after, the second returned results about cocaine and mdma prices per gram. As others have mentioned, absolutely miserable search, truly a groping about in the dark.

They might as well have clickable paths for you to follow based on categories and such. I would have had a lot more fun exploring their content in this way. Instead I'll probably never use this again.

jbob2000• 10 years ago

Is this a library? Or some kind of data service? How does this compare to http://www.highcharts.com/ ?

pcurve• 10 years ago

It's a collection of statistics represented in chart format. It's not javascript charting framework like highcharts or d3. It's more about browsing and sharing statistics.

delgaudm• 10 years ago

What an odd front page. "Type to search", with no indication of what to search for. I typed in 4 searches, got "No results found" for all of them. Strange.

lobo_tuerto• 10 years ago

I typed "Mexico" and got a series of charts back.

Seems like it's more like tag search.

a3n2• 10 years ago

I typed "search".

https://www.theatlas.com/search/search

lucideer• 10 years ago

The design is nice enough, but the UX is awful, and pretty much for only one reason: search.

It seems to be a site listing charts, stats, data. Scrolling down or using the "Explore" nav item top-left works fine for browsing.

Search seems to be a secondary feature that is a simple keyword search on site content (the kind of site search that's usually subtle and off to one side), as opposed to a deliberately designed and targeted search on specific content facets. For some odd reason some designer has thought this should be front and centre despite being not a very good way to find anything specific. Adding the following CSS rule would massively improve the site:

  .hero .search-container { display: none; }

Otherwise, it seems nicely put together

fareesh• 10 years ago

Tried to register but got a cryptic "Unable to register using that email address and username". Tried several combinations with no luck. I think it is in some sort of closed beta.

Being able to quickly generate a good looking chart that intelligently picks ranges, min, max, etc. and share it with a public URL seems nifty. Are there other similar services that have a pain-free way of doing this sans google sheets?

rfjedwards• 10 years ago

This is not a thing like Wolfram Alpha. It appears to be a searchable index of charts/data from Quartz (QZ.com) and partners (like sponsor GE). Note that T&C in registration goes to QZ.com (http://qz.com/about/terms-conditions/) .

bloaf2• 10 years ago

Thanks for that, Wolfram Alpha was the first comparison I thought of. Gapminder was the second.

http://www.gapminder.org/world

mozumder• 10 years ago

Graphiq does the exact same thing as well.

https://www.graphiq.com

CameronBanga• 10 years ago

What are the terms on these? Is the idea that someone could use these as citation in a presentation or paper?

And not sure given the page what I should be searching for? I only guessed businesses, because Quartz, but the search for Apple offered odd results.

m52go• 10 years ago

I wonder how lucrative the partnership with GE is / will be.

As a user interested in the future of digital economic models, I would love it if this sort arrangement makes the service viable...

The sponsorships is cleanly integrated and both entities' purposes seem to overlap (i.e., the ads are native...i.e., GE is showing charts like the rest of the site, not banner ads).

joezydeco• 10 years ago

I took this whole thing as a glorified GE analytics ad.

devonkim• 10 years ago

Probably related somewhat to the lukewarm general tech industry reception to Predix.

Flenser• 10 years ago

Other things called Atlas:

HashiCorp's Enterprise Suite - https://www.hashicorp.com/#products

Stripe's startup tools - https://stripe.com/atlas

Netflix's Telemetry Platform - http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netfli...

O’Reilly's learning environment - http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/

Boston Dynamics's Robot - http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_Atlas.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

Did I miss any?

imaginenore• 10 years ago

Also a book of maps.

danvayn• 10 years ago

Almost forgot about that one.

sw00• 10 years ago

atlas.torproject.org

SimplyUnknown• 10 years ago

Automatically tuned linear algebra software

WA• 10 years ago

Facebook's Ad thing: https://atlassolutions.com

bloaf2• 10 years ago

Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software - http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/

d--b2• 10 years ago

A very large person, long ago, tasked to carry the world or something

shriphani• 10 years ago

Tasked to carry the sky actually.

tansey• 10 years ago

There's a wearables company: https://www.atlaswearables.com/

proksoup• 10 years ago

Maybe doesn't qualify, but Atlassian.

seattle_spring• 10 years ago

There's also Ivy Softworks' Atlas (atlas.co). Similar logo, too.

Nux• 10 years ago

One of the vertebrae is called Atlas.

A collection of maps is also called Atlas.

weinzierl• 10 years ago

A global, open, distributed Internet measurement platform - https://atlas.ripe.net/

chasing• 10 years ago

Famous shrugger.

thom_nic• 10 years ago

The CERN particle collider detector - http://home.cern/about/experiments/atlas

ch• 10 years ago

The rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_%28rocket_family%29

mwg66• 10 years ago

The data analysis software using in Formula 1 (mandated by the SECU) - http://www.mclaren.com/appliedtechnologies/products/item/atl...

JorgeGT• 10 years ago

A mountain range which stretches across northwestern Africa.

mtmail• 10 years ago

MapBox on-premise map infrastructure https://www.mapbox.com/atlas/

Hasu• 10 years ago

There's a game company called Artillery that is developing an RTS called or code-named Atlas.

https://www.artillery.com/atlas

kfunk• 10 years ago

Facebook's ad server

anamoulous• 10 years ago

Fantastic, a searchable collection of graphs that take specialists from the media can misinterpret.

hauget• 10 years ago

No tutorial for first time visitors is kind of a fail. When a search fails, there should be a message stating something like "why don't you try searching for X".

dschnurr2• 10 years ago

Our team at Graphiq has been working on a similar tool for publishers and consumers to quickly find visualizations. One differentiator from Atlas is that many of our charts are dynamically generated on the fly based on the search query–for example, "usa vs india gdp", "population of the country with the tallest building", "obama vs clinton approval rating". You can try it out here: https://www.graphiq.com/search

vijayr• 10 years ago

I like it better than atlas. It is pretty fast too, considering the amount of data points you have.

findjashua2• 10 years ago

your search results are def more relevant than atlas - searching for `usa gdp` actually showed a chart on usa gdp!

an4rchy• 10 years ago

Graphiq has a much better search algorithm, or at least you've covered the primary use cases well.

Although, I'm curious, what is Graphiq's business model?

dschnurr2• 10 years ago

We provide visualizations to journalists and publishers for free and then monetize readers on our site through display advertising. Additionally, we have offerings for developers and companies who want to utilize our knowledge graph in different ways.

tomelders• 10 years ago

I'm heartened to see a distinct lack of 'donut' charts, the scourge of the infographic world.

devin• 10 years ago

Forgive me, but why has this story received so many upvotes? As others have mentioned, the front page provides no example of what to search for, and once I finally got a few results, they were less than interesting. Maybe I'm just not the target audience? Is there actually a need for this?

SingAlong• 10 years ago

If you try to register and get this error about invalid username and password, then try disabling your ad blocker (it worked for me that way).

liquidise• 10 years ago

While this is nifty idea, the execution is a bit off. More troubling is the shocking misrepresentation of much of the data.

Take the Diamond Cutters graph [1] where the Y-axis includes US, Namibia and "East Asia". Did "diamond cutters per capita per country" not show the the intended conclusion? This trend persists through many of the graphs i've clicked on.

1. https://www.theatlas.com/charts/EJJSh2f6e

ThatMightBePaul• 10 years ago

Why is this interesting, when the charts all lack clear data sources?

Numbers without context are meaningless.

findjashua2• 10 years ago

searching for `usa gdp` showed charts for everything other than usa gdp

aristus• 10 years ago

I searched for [oranges] and got a mix of fruit juice and prison inmate statistics. What kind of fuzzy matching is going on here?

iampuero• 10 years ago

My bet is that it matched the show "Orange is the new Black", seems just like its searching by tags.

misiti3780• 10 years ago

sorry if i dont understand here but is this basically gist for charts ?

duck• 10 years ago

This isn't new either, was shared a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763980

placeybordeaux• 10 years ago

US birth rate gives about 10 completely unrelated charts.

https://www.theatlas.com/search/us%20birth%20rate

abcampbell• 10 years ago

Good idea, but search isn't great

m104• 10 years ago

Do you have support for logarithmic charts?

Some of those top examples would benefit greatly from a logarithmic Y-axis.

galistoca• 10 years ago

Not really a "platform". It's just charts and graphs from QZ.

Atlas – a platform for charts and data

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