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Sorry, no code in this post. I decided to venture further from Flex development for a brief moment, and will focus on data and how it can be represented visually. My last post on data visualization sparked a desire to search the web to see what kinds of visualizations are out there.
Here are a few very interesting data visualizations that I found on the web, and wanted to share. I found these particularly interesting with both how they presented data and the aesthetic value of the end result.
Mapping Economic Activity for the World
I found this interesting because it combines economic data with geographic data, and provides an intersting economic density visualization around the globe. The combination of spatial data with quantitative data can a very effective way of representing a large amount of information with very little effort to interpret it. You can read more about this visualization here.
NIN Download Statistics
This is visually very similar to the previous example, however there are a few differences: 1) it is completely rendered within Google Earth, and 2) It shows the number of music downloads per geographic region. You can interact with it, and overlay other kml-based data sets, and potentially display some interesting data/correlations. You can read more about it on the Google Geo Developers blog.
History of the Panama Canal
Notice a trend here? Geographic data... By no means is this as "high tech" as the other examples here, but its a pretty good data visualization. It shows the combination of geographic data, distance (mileage), water/sea levels, and the amount of earth excavated per distance/locale. You can read more about it at:http://www.historyshots.com/Panama/index.cfm.
Twitter Conversations Map
This visualization shows the geographic flow of twitter conversations. I thought this was interesting because it is a different way of showing the geographic & social relationships on a flat plane. You can read more about it at: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=600&index=600&domain=
Patterns in Oscar Movies
Now, this data is pretty much useless to me. I just thought this looked cool. Its an interesting way of showing socially related data, and generates fractal-like patterns. You can read more about this at: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=572&index=572&domain=
Related Links:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
VisualComplexity.com is an interesting collection of data and network visualizations.
http://flowingdata.com/
FlowingData.com is another interesting collection of statistical data visualizations.
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/2008/04/16/data-visualisation-blogs-you-might-not-know-about/
A collection of blogs contianing information on data visualization.
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Andrew Trice
Principal Architect
Cynergy Systems
http://www.cynergysystems.com
Thanks for another cool post Andrew!
I find data visualization a fascinating subject, especially when coupled with geographic information. It's long been understood that humans take in more information visually than through any other sense, and that encoding information multi-modally increases our retention by a lot. More than simple graphs, this sort of data representation goes a long way in presenting information in meaningful ways.
Keep up the good work!
I'm glad you like it! I'm venturing further from the "RIA development" perspective here, but I think its still applicable.
Great examples of data visualization
Data visualization is an area of interest to me as well. Curl (http://www.curl.com) is an great tool for this type of work as it provides extremely fast 3D and 2D rendering capabilities and has a great 3D and 2D libraries.
The person that runs VisualComplexity (one of the web sites referenced in your post) actually helped us build an information visualization tool for facebook, called CurlGraph. It's open source and anyone can use it to visualize their personal Facebook social network. For those who are interested here is a link:
http://developers.curl.com/docs/DOC-1241