Simon Willison’s Weblog

If you’re a public data provider—and many large NGOs, government organizations, cultural organizations, historical archives, media organizations, medical orgs, and academic institutions are exactly that—you can publish gigabytes of data, and make it available as an API, and make it easy to browse on the web, too, with extremely low effort. Put it into SQLite, point this little guy at it, and you’ve just radically increased the accessibility and utility of your data. Because messing around in SQL from a web browser is orders of magnitude more immediately useful than downloading a CSV, processing it, and figuring out what comes next.

— Paul Ford