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.  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.  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.  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!

2 Comments on “Visualization and Data Topics

  1. The font color for your links is really light and kind of hard to read. Just thought you’d wanna know 😉

  2. Yeah, the whole site needs a new theme — this one is outdated and doesn’t support a lot of the new wordpress options anyway.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.

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