d8taplex is a data engine. A data engine is a tool which gathers large numbers of data sets from online sources and provides tools that allow users to discover, interact with and manipulate these data sets.

By discovering these data sets online and allowing users to interact with them, the hope is that individuals will be able to make better decisions, learn more about the science and statistics behind the politics and policies of their countries and have a clearer and more intuitive understanding of the quantified world.

d8taplex crawls the web and discovers data in various forms, including spreadsheets, html tables and plain text documents. It then interprets these raw documents and discovers any time series data within them. This data is then stored in an index and made available for browsing or searching.

Once a user has found a data set that is of interest, they can explore interactively and even compute some simple functions. For example, you can sum several time series together, or take the average value, or even smooth the time series. All of this is done from within the browser.

Data sets can also be downloaded so that they may be used in other statistical software packages, or uploaded into other data engines.