A couple of months ago, Simon Willison posted a talk he gave about building a personal data warehouse based on all the data that can be exported from the various services we are using or that are simply out there. Sadly, I only read it today but it was very inspirational!
So far I’ve only dabbled a little bit into actually using and combining that data with my geotrace project. That talk gave me some new ideas and so I might, in the future, try to also import such exports continuously into either SQLite or PostgreSQL data stores to make them reusable.
SQLite would have the advantage that I could easily share that data and use tools of Simon’s Dogsheep project (which is a great pun on Wolfram Alpha 😅). On the other hand, PostgreSQL would offer me more powerful features but would, at the same time, require some custom setup for having a local PostgreSQL server running and not interfering with my other systems. In the end, it might be a hybrid solution but perhaps I should just get started and worry about the details later 😉
I really like this idea of building your own personal data warehouse! I think I will simply start with the dumps I’ve received from Goodreads, Swarm et al. and see where it leads me. No matter what, I will put the data in close proximity to my personal information management system 😉
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