I’m a jazz fan. The combination of vinyl, low watt tube amplifcation, high efficency speakers and jazz works for me. Spinning some Miles Davis in particular I really enjoy.

Ok… enough on that. A couple of months ago, I spent a few minutes combining some of the tools that we’re building in the Simile project together to show the value of accessing data that is “behind” web pages and viewing this data in new and interesting ways. The Miles Davis discography timeline is a quick example of this (as well as a painful reminder of all of the Miles Davis albums I don’t have!).

For the unfortunate souls who don’t know who Miles Davis was, the BBC sums it up nicely…

“American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. He was in at the birth of hard bop, ‘cool’ jazz, modal jazz and jazz/rock fusion. For much of his life he struggled with racial prejudice and drug addiction. An icon of the modern age.” – BBC Artist Profile of Miles Davis.

The Miles Davis discography data (rdf/xml) and corresponding scraper that extracts the data from the BBC site are available for those interested in learning more. The Timeline tool is another excellent creation from David Huynh and provided by the Simile project.