When we first started showing off our Trend Animator charts of banking data, everyone liked it a lot. We also heard from folks that they were still waiting for Google to release the code from gapminder, and they were wondering if that was every going to happen.

Well, Google can continue to take their time, because we are turning ours over to the open source community.

The project is here by available on Source Forge as OSG Trend Animator

Feel free to download the code, experiment with it and do good things.

Salute to Nathan Redding who did the coding for this great component.

Anyone who has been following the financial news knows that banks and other large financial institutions are under a growing amount of strain given the misguided investments in speculative ventures over the past 5 years, including mortgages and exotic credit / investment packages.

While chasing down what state a company like Merrill-Lynch might be tough, banks are required to report data to the FDIC. The bad news is you end up with a massive pile of tabular text data that makes for potent nap fuel. Readers will recall that my team has been working on new techniques for finding and presenting massive information sets, a technology based on mashups and the semantic web we call Savant.

We decided to apply the Savant approach to this mass of data, adding in some ideas from the groundbreaking gapmider.org effort to create a dynamic overview of just how tough it's getting for banks and their mortgage portfolios.

First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total assets of the bank along the horizontal axis, the value of loans that go 90+ days late on the vertical, and the size of the circles represent the total loan portfolio for that bank. You can set the charts in motion by hitting the "Play" button and stop them at any time. Hovering over a circle will show you the value for that data point.

Our charts step forward in time for Q1-2002 one quarter at a time, reading directly from the bank's own FDIC reports.

Bank Portfolios - 90+ Days Late

Savant is a system for enabling enterprise use of "Content Based Integration". Content is the name for what makes the World Wide Web tick - information in human and machine readable form. For the most part one can think of content as a coherent set of written or illustrative information on a specific subject. When you look at a web site like Amazon.com, you see a wide set of small frames of information - each one of them have words and pictures in them - each one of those frames holds content. Content conveys information along with tags and attributes that describe what it represents and how things relate.

Many IT experts suspect the next big wave of revolution in systems will come from the ability to allow users to subscribe to content on subjects that matter to their work or their interests, and use dynamic web based and desktop systems to assemble this content for them. Think of it as a newspaper that re-publishes itself several times an hour, but only contains the things you want, and are interested in. Another term for this is "Mashups", a term that I think strips some of the meaning of what really should be going on.

You can see early efforts to master this new techniques in products such as Yahoo Pipes, IBM QEDWIKI, and others. The persistent theme behind these examples is that they try very hard to piece something useful and relevant together from whatever they can scavenge from the broader internet. For these current first generation of tools all of the engineering focus went into how to build a wizzy, glittering front end that contained all of the fancy, next-gen Web 2.0 (TM) features on full display.

With our business and public awareness growing, it's time for us to unleash a new web site. We will continue to modify and grow it as we move forward - look for more good things at this URL!