Thursday, January 2, 2014

Tanagra, tenth anniversary

First of all, let me introduce you to all my wishes of happiness, health and success for the year 2014 which begins.

For Tanagra, 2014 is of quite particular importance. 10 Years ago almost to the day, the first version of the software has been put on line. Designed originally as a tool for the students and researchers in the data mining domain, the project has changed a bit of nature in recent years. Today, Tanagra is an academic project which provides a point of access to the statistical and the data mining techniques. It is addressed to students, but also to the researchers of other areas (psychology, sociology, archeology, etc.). It allows, I hope, make it more attractive, more clear, the implementation of these techniques on real case studies.

This mutation was accompanied by a refocusing of my activity. The Tanagra software is still evolving (we are at version 1.4.50), new methods are added, existing components are regularly improved, but at the same time I put emphasis on the documentation in the form of books, training materials and tutorials. The underlying idea is very simple: understanding the ins and outs of the methods is the best way to learn how to use software which proposes them.

Over the past 5 years (2009/01/01 to 2013/12/31), my site gets 677 visits per day. The 10 countries that come most often are: France, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, United States, India, Canada, Belgium, United Kingdom and Brazil. The page of the materials for my data mining courses is the most visited (http://eric.univ-lyon2.fr/~ricco/cours/supports_data_mining.html; 99 visits per day, 6 minutes 35 seconds average time spent on the page). At the same time, I note with great satisfaction that the English pages are overall as much visited as those in French. I think that the effort to write documentation in English is fruitful.

I hope that this work will be useful for a long time, and that 2014 will be the opportunity of exchanges always so rewarding for everybody.

Ricco.