well-formed data

(again from vinay)

moritz stefaner has a great experiment in organizing and displaying structured data -- he's taken the nobel laureate database and made it much more navigable by intelligent application of filters and by adding (though it seems a bit of an afterthought) edward tufte's by now famous sparklines (tufte himself, and diy). the display ideas in here are interesting particularly in the context of search -- for queries that have broad semantic ranges, metadata about the distribution of results becomes potentially quite useful both as a selection tool and as a filtering tool. a term like "tiger" could be most relevant, depending on your interests, to great cats, golf, public-domain GIS data, magazines, a low-cost asian airline, a traditional liniment, and more. allowing power-users to cluster results by nearby terms (something like a filter preview) would probably be really helpful.