As an update to my earlier blog entry, I noticed this afternoon that Microsoft has opened the Pivot project to public beta. It is a rich client application and as such, it requires a client side download and install. The hardware/software requirements are very steep too, so make a note of that if you are seriously considering this tool. It is, though, a very interesting application and I can see several uses for this software, including my current project. You can view a collection in many different ways along any one of the pre-defined “facets.” The definitions of the collections are defined by an xml file which is documented here. It should be pointed out that the installer imports browser favorites and history during the installation process. This is so that it can depict your history as another collection type. Overall, I find the experiment to be useful for certain types of data mining type applications.