A Data Droppable Website is simply pushing content and structured data to a location and letting the website interpret that for displaying it in-site. It could involve an API, or more preferably - a location which is available for publishing to.
The key feature of a Droppable Data Website is the removal of much of the manual overhead in updating and transferring content. Our quick win is how our implementation of Data Droppable Website focuses on self-discovery of data - our web data platform figures out what content needs to be displayed in terms of whether the report is a map, a table, a chart. Additionally, configuration in terms of what data should not be filterable is built into the platform.
Our Web Data Platform is therefore, a self-discovery data ready website requiring minimum intervention.
Our website is the perfect combination of latest technology - ASP.Net Core running on Piranha CMS with a simple server data folder structure. Our website can accept content dropped into these folders, and then process them, incorporating that data into the website. We see that secure FTP access to these folders is all that is needed to publish data to the website.
We have a base folder per main content type - currently;
Articles (Markdown format - a simplified HTML structure)
Entity/Subject area - could be a company, a set of locations
Topic - A sub category. For example, we have a subject of "Websites" and a topic of "Guides"
Reports - json files are dropped in this area
Entity Subject Area
We push data to our website via FTP. It is simple as this. Periodically, our website scans these folders to take new content into the website.
The majority of the content is stored in the website cache. Importantly, the heavy lifting is performed once.
Reportable content is pushed to a document database (NoSQL) through our Report Manager functionality. We build up lists of values for filtering and permit dynamic querying.
At Info Rhino, a lot of our experience has been developing data visualisation - dashboards, reports
We have created an immersive data-centric website which delivers vast amounts of searchable and analytical information dynamically. Users get to see data in ways which feels as if developed by a Dashboard/Data-visualisation guru, when indeed, it is all data driven.
Example of the Data Droppable Website
Written with StackEdit.