Posted on April 22, 2011
Visualization and Data Topics
Topics near and dear to my heart, largely because they keep me employed, absolutely include all things Data related. In particular, lately, Data Visualization has been a hot topic. We got to attend a presentation today by Frank van Ham about some IBM offerings in the Data Visualization space.
IBM has some pretty cool things going on. Â Sadly for us tinkerers, a lot of their cool stuff is either tied to expensive proprietary software, or simply way too complicated to just play around in your free hours with a random data set and a laptop. Â Fortunately, Frank reminded me that there are a lot of tools out there, that can let you do just that sort of playing, and often with a tiny footprint and for free. Â IBM, for example, runs Many Eyes, which is apparently now bearing their Cognos brand, and which allows you to play with a ton of cool visualizations without too much more than a web browser.
Many Eyes isn’t alone, though… right now I’ve got over a hundred decent sites tagged “visualization” over at del.icio.us. Many Eyes is one of them; Protovis, Processing.js, Flare, and many others provide a rich playing field for starting with visualization. Some of these are tools, others are examples, but there’s plenty to look through so you can gain inspiration or code snippets.
Enoy!
The font color for your links is really light and kind of hard to read. Just thought you’d wanna know 😉
Yeah, the whole site needs a new theme — this one is outdated and doesn’t support a lot of the new wordpress options anyway. I can probably fix the link thingy, but it’s got tons of other issues too. Working on it.