Recently in Data Visualization Category

As we get access to more and more data, we need more, and more interesting, ways of looking at it--and I keep tripping over some of these interesting visualizations. Sometimes they're even worth using!

• One of the nice things about online bookstores like Amazon is that you can find just exactly what you want, instantly. Of course, that eliminates part of the charm of going into a bricks-and-mortar shop and discovering something you weren't expecting. So, consider Zoomii, which is a more real-world like bookstore experience. Working like the love-child of Amazon and Google Maps, you browse books visually, zooming in on "shelves" and looking at book covers. As a front-end, you can buy the books you find on Amazon; Zoomii makes their money through the Amazon Associates program.


• Want to explore the Linux kernel? Try the Interactive Linux Kernel Map. It's a lot like the Zoomii (or Google Maps, for that matter): scroll-wheel to zoom in and out, click and drag to move around, and click to open up source code. Not as slick, perhaps, as other visualizations, but certainly useful if you're interested in understanding how the Linux kernel works.


• It's one thing to remap huge databases into user-friendly interfaces; it's another to demonstrate relationships among different entities. That's what these Maps of science show: how different scientific fields are related to each other.


• Not exactly data visualization, but it's a neat application, Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), from Microsoft Research, is a friendlier and possibly easier alternative to CAPTCHA for sorting out bots from humans. The idea is to require completion of a task that's pretty easy for humans, but almost impossible for computers: differentiate between photos of cats and dogs. I played with it for a while, and it seems as if you don't have to get all the cats perfectly, but as long as you only miss one (I think) and don't misidentify any dogs as cats, you can pass for human.

If you're into interesting new ways to visualize data, check this out: SpicyNodes. (I saw it on Metafilter).

For whatever reason, the SpicyNodes website gives me little information, but you can see a couple of implementations, here: Daylight Savings Time and here: Family Tree of the Greek Gods.

It reminds me of old-school hypertext, from back in the days before there was such a thing as an Internet protocol for hypertext (HTTP). Kind of neat, but just how likely is it to scale? Let me know what you think.

But before you do that, check this: The Best Tools for Visualization. Lots of good, creative stuff in there, with neat new ways of looking at data from all over.

And, just in case I haven't pointed to it yet, there's IBM's Many Eyes, which has plenty of visualizations as well as plenty of data sets to play with.

Enjoy!

I'm fascinated by the physics of time travel, but the type "time travel" instead of "travel time" caught my eye in the link I clicked on to get to Travel-time Maps and their Uses and this More travel-time maps and their uses. Not maps for time travelers, but maps that illustrate the amount of time it takes to travel.

Very interesting and even helpful if you're in the UK: you can use these maps, for example, to figure out whether it's quicker to drive or take a train to a destination, or the fastest mode of transportation for rush hour commuting. But it's also a very neat illustration of how big piles of data can be turned into intelligence. And you don't need me to explain how that kind of intelligence can become "business intelligence" for any business that needs to allocate resources to get people or things from one place to another.

It's all brought to you by mySociety, a charitable project that develops their software as open source; if you're interested in having them do custom mapping for your business, they seem to be willing to do that for a fee (or a donation, I'm not sure how that works in the UK).

To see just how far we've come with new ways to look at business information derived from databases, check out Data Visualization: Modern Approaches, from Smashing Magazine, a web-zine for web-developers and designers.

Some of these new approaches may not be as cool as their creators might wish, but they certainly do look like a whole new revolution, especially if you can remember the revolution wrought by Lotus 1-2-3? Those simple pie and bar charts made then state-of-the-art greenbar printout reports look like something out of a cave.

The past few years we've seen a huge flood of heavy-duty software tools being made available to anyone with a PC through the magic of open source software. Combine that with hundreds of millions of people getting connected to the global Internet and the growing tide of social-networking/web 2.0 applications chock full of database goodness, and you've got a hotbed of new activity and new creativity.

The art and science of database management and business intelligence is hardly new, and many mistakenly believe it to be a boring realm of reports based on decades-old mainframe greenbar printouts. In fact, though, there's more new and exciting developments in the field than ever.

Consider data visualization: if you think it's all (and only) about the same boring old pie charts and bar graphs that you've been doing since Visicalc days, think again. You can read about 16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools at the Mashable Social Networking News blog. You could easily spend a week exploring and fiddling around with all the tools mentioned here, and not a pie or bar chart in a carload.

The stunning thing is that all of these tools for visualization are used to distill the essence of information from sometimes vast quantities of data. Kind of what the business information business is all about. So even if you don't care about Web 2.0, you can learn a lot from it anyway.