Search Computing Blog

An amazing information visualization video from Hans Rosling.

This video is enabled by Trendalyzer, an information visualization software for animation of statistics that was initially developed by Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Foundation and then was acquired by Google Inc in 2007. Some components, such as the Flash-based Motion Chart gadget, have become available for public use as part of the Google Visualizations API.

This kind of applications open several opportunities for SeCo as a data generator for dynamic, animated storytelling upon Web data.

A few examples of data visualization solutions for complex / multidomain web data:

http://www.geovista.psu.edu/grants/cdcesda/software/

http://www.thegardnerteam.net/
(new visual search technology on real estate domain)

Another interesting application is this realtime visualizer of the London underground status:

A nice overview on data visualization is available in this very interesting work by Geoff McGhee from Stanford University, comprising interviews, summaries, insights and visions:
Journalism in the Age of Data: A Video Report on Data Visualization.

http://datajournalism.stanford.edu/

ACM Queue has just published an interesting survey by Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky on advanced visualization techniques.

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Via O’Reilly Radar:

ToxicLibs — an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing.

The library, programmed in Java, contains something like 130+ classes devoted to computational design which, for the purposes of Search Computing, might translate into data visualization and interaction.

The library features packages for audio, color, geometries, and physic effects management. A set of demo applications is hosted on openprocessing.org.

Liquid Query: Multi-domain Exploratory Search on the Web

The slides refer to our presentation at WWW 2010. Have a look to our even planner demo!

The abstract of the paper and a demonstration video follow.

One of the research tracks within the Search Computing project deals with Visual Interfaces and User Interaction for Search Computing. There are plenty of JavaScript libraries out there for rendering data. This post lists 5 data visualization tools that we considered for our experiments and prototypal applications.

• The Javascript Information Visualization Toolkit: The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web. JIT supports multiple data representations (Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, etc), it works in the most recent versions of major browsers (IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+ ). JIT is licensed under the BSD License.

• Stanford Protovis: Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations. Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example.
• Flare: Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license.
• Processing.js: Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games. Processing.js is explicitly developed for browsers that support the HTML5 <Canvas> element. Processing.js runs in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but will not be supported in Internet Explorer until Mircosoft catch up with ISSUE 15.
• Raphaël: Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOMobject, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

copy right note: The content of this post has been  cut and pasted from the respective technologies’ Web sites, to increase their awarness.

ManyEyes is a IBM social networking application for data visualization, where one may share and visualize data sets via a social network.

With more than 20 data visualization types and  more than 100.000 publicly available data-sets, ManyEyes is a remarkable example of generic data visualization techniques adapted to heterogeneous data sources. Moreover, the available data-sets can be downloaded and used as data sources for mash-up applications.

More information on ManyEyes can be found on the project Web site.

As an increasing number of organizations feels the need to open up their data for public usage, it also arises the need for tools able to unlock the intrinsic  value of such data. Following a trend that already saw the creation of a public data search feature, Google Lab just launched the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool.

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Synesketch is a software library (Java API) for sensing and creative visualization of textual emotions. 

According to the project’s WIKI, Synesketch

is a result of a research that spreads out through several diverse fields – from natural language processing techniques based on WordNet, across Ekman’s research of emotions, to color psychology, visual design, data visualizations, and affective computing. Graphics were done by Processing, a great tool for programming visual art

uses a WordNet-based lexicon of words with emotional weights, and several NLP heuristic rules (e.g. emotional intensity of a sentence with emotional words is proportional to the number of exclamation marks at the end of the sentence). The algorithm transfers a (presumably small) chunk of text (e.g. basic unit of text in a chat conversation) into several emotional parameters … which defines emotional content of the text.

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