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Visualisation Tools/Applications
Visualising data can be challenging, especially when dealing with huge volumes of information. Data comes in all forms and it is becoming increasingly challenging to find the right visual tool to either visualise your own data or to find related content. Each can be difficult, depending on what data you have or are looking.
Which tool fits my needs?
Using these tools (practically all free here) you can visualise data in a structure that people are simply going to get it, see the bigger picture & hopefully solve problems with informed decisions from the insights gained.
previously updated 31-01-2010
last updated 04-03-2010
Whether your data is to:
- calorie counting, count anything...
- find books for inspiration, musicians, authors, actors, like minded individuals,
- your computer disk space usage,
- baby name inspiration.
- test your visuals accessibility to types of colour blindness
- thesaurus of words,
- I'm sure there is a tool to treat & suit your needs.
Note: I will eventually do some names and anchors, alphabetically when more time. Think google provide a site-page search too, might be handy.
100+ tools to make charts of every type, see
15 music visualisation tools -
5 inspiration search, 2 sound structures, 1 last.fm
2 alternative search engines
5 news visualisation tools +
1 rss reader vis tool +
1 screen saver rss visual
5 digg visualisation tools 4 collaborative mapping visualisation tools
Many many more.
3 embeddable image zoom tools
3 online sketching drawing tools - 1 embeddable
2 large file online uploaders visualisation tools
2 gps drawing mobile tools
1 mailing list visualisation tools
2 twitter visualisation tools (probably more I haven't sourced)
Flickr Related Tag Browser allows you to search for a series of tags and see related tags. Clicking on a different tag brings up new related tags. You can zoom into the tag selected in the center of the screen by hovering and see images tagged with that word. It also gives a total image count and lets you browse by page.
AnyChart AnyChart is a flexible Flash based solution that allows you to create interactive and great looking flash charts
Ajax.org Ajax.org Platform is a pure javascript application framework for creating real-time collaborative applications that run in the browser.
Arc is a product from Digg Labs that shows the latest Diggs, and the relationships between the users submitting and digging them. There are two different speed modes, the slower of which is great if you actually want to read the story headlines.
Axiis Axiis is a Data Visualization Framework for Flex. It has been designed to be a concise, expressive, and modular framework that let developers and designers create compelling data visualization solutions. Also, take a look at the nice window-in-window design on the saturnboy blog.
MusicMap is similar to TuneGlue in its interface, but seems slightly more intuitive. Search for an artist or band and a list of albums will come up. Once you choose an album a circle pops up on the map. From there you can expand to get related albums, remove that album, or get more information.
BirdEye BirdEye is a community project to advance the design and development of a comprehensive open source information visualization and visual analytics library for Adobe Flex. The actionscript-based library enables users to create multi-dimensional data visualization interfaces for the analysis and presentation of information.
Tuneglue is another music visualization service. Just type any artist or band into the search box and hit enter. A circle comes up representing that band. You can then expand from there, clicking on any new additions after each expansion to expand further. By click on “releases” you can order their albums from Amazon./
Chronoscope If you need to visualize thousands or millions of points of data, check this out. Very well designed and can be navigated with the keyboard or mouse. There's a Javascript API, a Google Visualization API or try it as a Google Gadget on Google Spreadsheets, iGoogle, or Open Social.
Degrafa Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework for creating rich user interfaces, data visualization, mapping, graphics editing and more.
Looks Del.icio.us is a collection of different Delicious bookmark visualizations. They’re created with a python-based graphics library and layout engine.
SimpleDiagrams keeps the visual expression clear through the simple design of library items and backgrounds.
DojoX Data Chart An addition in the Dojo 1.3 release is the new dojox.charting class. Its primary purpose is to make connecting a chart to a Data Store a simple process.
Dundas Dundas has a wide range of data visualization solutions for Microsoft technologies. They offer a number of data visualization tools including: Chart, Gauge, Map and Calendar for .net and Dashboards for Silverlight.
ExtJs Ext JS is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building rich internet applications. It now includes charts.
Tag Galaxy lets you search for Flickr tags and have them shown visually in a mockup of a star system. Clicking on any planet (tag) within the first representation changes the image and recenters that tag as the star and pops up new related tags as planets. Clicking on the sun itself brings up a globe covered in images tagged as you’ve specified.
Fidg’t is a desktop app that uses Flickr and Last.fm tags to let you visualize your network and their tagging activities. You can see what your network’s predispositions are toward different tags and types of content.
Flex Flex has built in chart controls: area, bar, bubble, candlestick, column, HLOCC, Line, Pie, Plot. Quick tutorial here that can get you up and running with nicely styled charts using effects. Flex uses FXG, a graphical interchange format developed by Adobe and is similar in many ways to SVG. Nice article here by James Whittaker looking at FXG and Degrafa. And you should definitely have this book on your desk if you are using Flex: Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0.
WikiMindMap is a tool to visually browse Wiki content in a mind-map format and includes the ability to download any of their mindmaps in FreeMind format.
FlexMonster Pivot Table and Charts Flexmonster provides Pivot table Flex/Flash components rich internet application (RIA) development services.
Mapa de Conocimiento (Map of Knowledge) is a schematic of knowledge involved in any given idea or project. Built in Flash, this tool visualizes a group of URLs organized under main ideas. The map is available in English and Spanish.
FusionCharts Animated flash charts for web apps. Looks like they work with most technologies.
Google Chart API The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts.
gRaphaël gRaphaël is a Javascript library to help you create stunning charts on your website.
Narratives 2.0. Java Applet. Narrative 2.0 visualises music. The music was segmented in single channels. The channels are shown fanlike and the lines move from the center away with the time. The angle of the line changes according to the frequency of the channel, while the frequency reaching a high level, the channel becomes highlighted by orange.
JQuery Plugins. There are a lot of JQuery chart plugins:
- Visualize by the Filament Group
- JQChart
- Flot
- Sparklines
- TufteGraph
Newspaper Map is a visualization of the rules of the daily production of a newspaper is a striking graphic format. The closeness of words signifies their relationships with each other as do lines traced between words.
JPowered The PHP graphing scripts provide a very easy way to embed dynamically generated graphs and charts into PHP applications and HTML web pages. I can only hope that CSS can make these look better. I'll do a follow up post on how to make your charts aesthetically pleasing.
GraphNews is a news visualization browser from the Libero WebNews service. It shows news stories in a mind-map-like format. Clicking on one node recreates the graph with the clicked item as the focus.
JSCharts JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs.
Kap IT Labs Diagrammer and Visualizer Kap Lab's Diagrammer provides ready-to-use yet highly customizable multi-layout data visualization and diagramming for Adobe Flex and Air. Visualizer displays data as graphs to better visualize connections. Kap Lab's Visualizer provides ready-to-use yet highly customizable multi-layout data visualization for Adobe Flex and Air.
Resource System Reference Database was presented as a poster at InfoVis2004, IEEE’s annual conference. In this visualization, line weight shows the strength of relationships.
MilkChart A simple to use, yet robust library for transforming table data into a chart. This library uses the HTML5 tag and is only supported on browsers other than IE until ExCanvas gets proper text support.
Schemaball visualizes SQL database schema. Relationships are shown based on foreign keys within tables. It’s capable of showing schemas with hundreds of different tables and relationships.
Open Flash Charts Open source Flash charts.
Stack is probably the most useful of the visualization offerings from Digg. Stories with the most recent activity load across the bottom of the screen and then ‘Diggs’ seemingly fall from the sky to land and create a real-time graph of what stories are popular. Whenever a ‘Digg’ hits a story stack, the title of the story is shown at the bottom of the screen, pushing previous stories down, and eventually off the screen.
Open Flash Charts Open source Flash charts.
Swarm has one of the cooler user interfaces of all the Digg Labs offerings, with stories and users flying around on the screen. When someone ‘diggs’ a story, they fly over to the circle representing the story itself and are briefly linked up to it. Hovering over a story or user shows its name and allows you to click. You can also download Swarm as a screensaver.
PlotKit PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support.
TwittEarth shows live tweets from all over the world on a 3D globe. It’s a great visualization tool to see where tweets are coming from in real time and discover new people to follow. It’s also fascinating just to sit and watch.
Protovis Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.
Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight comes with the bar, line, pie, column, and scatter charts.
Telerik Charts for Silverlight, WFP, ASP.NET Telerik Charts offers rich functionality and data presentation capabilities.
Voyage is a web-based RSS reader that visually displays RSS feeds on a timeline. It’s a great way to explore the different feeds you subscribe in a completely different format.
Twingly Screensaver visualizes the blogosphere worldwide in real time. You get a continuous feed of blog activity straight to your screen.
Walrus is a visualization tool that allows you to interact with massive graphs in a 3D interface. Interaction is based on selecting any node and then having the graph zoom in to expand on that point.
Universe is a great app for visualizing the “universe” of particular search terms. There are sample terms available or you can input whatever you choose. The visualization given is reminiscent of astronomical charts.
We Feel Fine is one of the most interesting visualization tools I came across. It provides visualizations on the general feelings populating the blogosphere on any given day. You can filter results based on age, location, gender, weather, and other criteria. There are six different visualizations available: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds, each of which give a different portrait of the general feelings abounding on the internet.
VisiFire Visifire is a set of open source data visualization controls - powered by Microsoft® Silverlight™ & WPF.
yFiles for Ajax , .NET or Flex The yFiles product family means state-of-the-art software components for the visualization of networks and diagrams. Unequaled automatic diagram layout, cutting edge graph analysis, and extraordinary visualization.
