#272 Text as well as numeric Ravels

[Steve Keen]

This is a nice illustration of why we should support text as well as numbers as the data in Ravels. This Ravel imports the Penn World Tables (see http://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/), where they use codes for both countries and variable names. I would like to be able to link 2 more Ravels to the input Ravel, one showing country code and country name, the other showing variable code and variable name. At a later stage, these can function like conjoint variables: AUS can be substituted by Australia for graphs, etc.

[High Performance Coder]

Not sure what is being suggested here...

[Steve Keen]

I expressed it badly there, and with a bad example, more suited to conjoint
dimensions than having text as the underlying data type.

Think of the vaccination database you managed to import recently. If the
underlying data could be text rather than numeric, then the "symptoms
manifest" could be visually checked against dimensions like sex, type of
vaccine, etc.

This isn't major anyway--something for a version 2.0 release

[High Performance Coder]

One way of handling text data is the virtual counter idea, as per https://sourceforge.net/p/minsky/ravel/378/. This allows one to analyse such datasets from a statistical point of view.

The only other thing you can do with text data is look at the value at a given point in hyperspace. But the Ravel interface is probably just as clumsy as doing a search in a spreadsheet for this.

[High Performance Coder]

Ticket moved from /p/minsky/ravel/172/