The challenges of presenting large amount of data visually in a way that one will be able to easily digest and understand it are becoming more viable daily. The democratization of data, challenge authors to think about new ways to visualize it.
The above text, is pretty much the summery of this highly inspiring video called Journalism in the Age of Data. As the name suggest this video is mainly about journalism data viz, but, it is also highly inspiring for anyone dealing with data of any kind.
Many RIA applications today struggle with the ability to present large data sets to the user in away which he can digest and understand.
I would say that many of these new apps, especially in the enterprise space and from the last few years, are built upon the Flex framework.
As RIA developers many of us face these challenges in the day to day work. Obviously, the charts that comes bundled with the Flex framework won’t suffice most of the time, and one would need to relay on third party components or role her own. Not so long ago, its seemed that this area is blooming. The amazing open source projects like Flare and BirdEye. The slick commercial components, IBM ILOG Elixir and KapLab – ridiculously priced and has draconian licensing, respectively.
Today, these open source projects seems to be abandoned and the commercial tools prices seem to increase. The field of online data visualization is exploding and yet the Flex tools seems a bit halted.
The somewhat halted SilverLight with its basic charts and decent third party components. And the HTML5 alternatives, like Protovis, which still needs some maturity – doesn’t seem to provide the alternative.
Anyhow, if one wants to create something “out of the box”, than she needs to use something like Flare as the base and invent her own data viz, other than use some slick, out of the box, components.
InsideRIA has an immense list of with most data visualization frameworks and resources
The Video
I’ve extracted some selected examples, for your convenience:
Many Eyes (Java)
Budget Forecasts, Compared With Reality (Flash)
The Jobless Rate for People Like You (Flash)
In graphics: Eurozone in crisis (HTML)
The Stimulus Tracker (Flash)
Crash: Death on Britain’s roads (Flash, HTML)
How Different Groups Spend Their Day
The Crises of Credit
Last.fm Listening History – What have I been listening to?
Eurovision Song Contest 2008 (Flash)
Google public data explorer (Flash, HTML)
Oakland Crimespotting (Flash)
Tracking Taxi Flow Across the City
Blogs:
http://infosthetics.com/
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
http://flowingdata.com/
http://blog.blprnt.com/
http://www.good.is/infographics
http://eagereyes.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog
http://well-formed-data.net (not from the video)