Just the facts, mama... and the first release of Factual C# / .NET driver

Factual - First Release of Factual C# / .NET Driver

We’re pleased to announce the release of the officially supported C# / .NET driver for Factual.

Get going!
The driver is available on Nuget. To install the driver into your Visual Studio project, go to the package manager console window and do this:

Install-Package FactualDriver

See the README for more details, including instructions for non-Nuget use.

Once you have the driver installed in your project, you can create an authenticated handle to Factual like this:

Factual factual = new Factual(MY_KEY, MY_SECRET);(If you don’t have an API key, sign up to get one. It’s free and easy.)

Basic Query Example
Do a full-text search of Factual’s Places table for entities matching “Sushi Santa Monica”:

factual.Fetch("places", new Query().Search("Sushi Santa Monica"));

You can find out more about detailed query capabilities in the driver’s README as well as the general docs for our Core API docs.

Geo Filter Example
The driver supports all of Factual’s Geo Filtering. Here’s an example of finding Starbucks locations near a latitude, longitude:

factual.Fetch("places", new Query()
                              .Field("name").BeginsWith("Starbucks")
                              .WithIn(new Circle(34.06018, -118.41835, 5000)));

...

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Factual / factual-csharp-driver

Officially supported .NET driver for Factual's public API.

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Factual - About

Making Data Accessible

Factual is an open data platform for application developers that leverages large-scale data aggregation and community exchange. Our focus is on making data more accessible (i.e. cheaper, higher quality, less encumbered) for machines and developers, to drive and accelerate innovation in an unprecedented way. We take on the dirty work of data management and data curation, letting developers focus on higher value and more productive tasks. We provide clean, structured data with complete source transparency to developers via both download and API access on liberal terms.

The Data

Our data includes comprehensive Global Places data, with over 60MM entities in 50 countries, as well as deep dives in verticals such as U.S. Restaurants and U.S. Healthcare Providers. We are continually improving and adding to our data; feel free to explore and sign up to get started!

Factual aggregates data from many sources including partners, user community, and the web, and applies a sophisticated machine-learning technology stack to:

1. Extract both unstructured and structured data from millions of sources
2. Clean, standardize, and canonicalize the data
3. Merge, de-dupe, and map entities across multiple sources.

We encourage our partners to provide edits and contributions back to the data ecosystem as a form of currency to reduce the overall transaction costs via exchange.

Is is lame that I didn't know about Factual until I saw this news item? Anyway, I know about it now!

Just a few cool points:

• Factual is based in Los Angeles (support your local tech!)
• It looks like it has some cool data
• Getting a key to that data is free and easy
• There's now the official .Net library
• That library is OSS

hummmm... I think I see a weekend project here... :)

(via socaltech.net - Factual Releases C#/.NET Driver)