One of the many things on my “to do” list is to put together a blogged script that wires together RStudio, Jupyter notebook server, Shiny server, OpenRefine, PostgreSQL and MongDB containers, and perhaps data extraction services like Apache Tika or Tabula and a few OpenRefine style reconciliation services, along with a common shared data container, so the whole lot can be launched on Digital Ocean at a single click to provide a data wrangling playspace with all sorts of application goodness to hand.

(Actually, I think I had a script that was more or less there for chunks of that when I was looking at a docker solution for the databases courses, but that fell by the way side and I suspect the the Jupyter container (IPython notebook server, as was), probably needs a fair bit of updating by now. And I’ve no time or mental energy to look at it right now…:-(

Anyway, the IBM Data Scientist Workbench now sits alongside things like KMis longstanding KMi Crunch Learning Analytics Environment (RStudio + MySQL), and the Australian ResBaz Cloud – Containerised Research Apps Service in my list of why the heck can’t we get our act together to offer this sort of SaaS thing to learners? And yes I know there are cost applications…. but, erm, sponsorship, cough… get-started tokens then PAYG, cough…

It currently offers access to personal persistent storage and the ability to launch OpenRefine, RStudio and Jupyter notebooks:

The toolbar also suggest that the ability to “discover” pre-identified data sources and run pre-configured modeling tools is also on the cards.

The applications themselves run off a subdomain tied to your account – and of course, they’re all available through the browser…

So what’s next? I’d quite like to see ‘data import packs’ that would allow me to easily pull in data from particular sources, such as the CDRC, and quickly get started working with the data. (And again: yes, I know, I could start doing that anyway… maybe when I get round to actually doing something with isleofdata.com ?!;-)

See also these recipes for running app containers on Digital Ocean via Tutum: RStudio, Shiny server, OpenRefine and OpenRefine reconciliation services, and these Seven Ways of Running IPython / Jupyter Notebooks.