Rapid-I announced this week that it will offer a marketplace for RapidMiner extensions to its open source data mining tool RapidMiner. “Over the years, many of you have been developing new RapidMiner Extensions dedicated to a broad set of topics,” the company’s announcement stays. “Whereas these extensions are easy to install in RapidMiner – just download and place them in the plugins folder – the hard part is to find them in the vastness that is the Internet.” You can visit the beta version of the extension marketplace here.
It doesn’t appear that there’s a mechanism for offering paid extensions, yet. But Decision Stats blogger Ajay Ohri hopes to see this turn into an app store for algorithms.
“For some time now, I had been hoping for a place where new package or algorithm developers get at least a fraction of the money that iPad or iPhone application developers get,” Ohri writes. “It is hard work to think of new algols, and some of them can really be useful.”
Ohri hopes that there will be a way for data miners to at least donate money to algorithm inventors through the RapidMiner interface.
Since Microsoft and other companies are already offering marketplaces for data, an algorithm marketplace makes sense as the next logical step. What do you think? Is it time for an app store for algorithms?
