OpenSpending natural language questions

15.03.2013

There are a lot of questions one could ask a financial dataset. Incorporating answers to all of these questions into the OpenSpending Web site is not feasible. The OpenSpending API is quite powerful but a bit more difficult to use. I wanted an interface like Wolfram Alpha or Siri for OpenSpending.

So I came up with Osiris, an interface to ask natural language questions that get answered via the OpenSpending API. To cover up the ad-hoc implementation and lack of deeper AI, the user can dictate her question and the website will speak the answer. Just hope that the OpenSpending API is not down or really slow.

Osiris was one of my first tries with CoffeeScript, but also never made it out of fun hack stage.