Data Visualization
October 10th, 2011
What is Data Visualization?
Good question! In a nutshell (and much as you would expect) data visualization is the visual representation of data. For a more helpful definition you might want to see the Wikipedia Data Visualization entry or Matthew Ward’s Overview of Data Visualization talk overview. For an interactive chart displaying various different visualization methods (including data visualization) see A Periodic Table of Visualization.
The Value of Data Visualization from Column Five on Vimeo.
Short List
Here is just a smattering of of data visualization applications & programming languages, with an emphasis on open source resources.
see also the data visualization software list (wikipedia)
| Name | Description | Platform/OS/Browser | Language(s) | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Chart Tools | The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts with a URL string. You can embed these charts on your web page, or download the image for local or offline use. | browser-based API | ||
| birdeye | Information Visualization and Visual Analytics Library for Adobe Flex | actionscript | MIT license | |
| flot | Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. | Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2.x+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ or Konqueror 4.x+ with the HTML canvas tag. | javascript | MIT License |
| Flare | Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. | actionscript | BSD | |
| Gelphi | Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. | Windows, Linux, MacOS X | Java version 6 or later | AGPL 3 |
| JUNG | Java Universal Network/Graph Framework | Java | BSD license | |
| Many Eyes | upload and share data and create visualizations from your or others' data sets | browser-based tool | terms of use | |
| NodeBox | NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python | MacOS | Python | MIT License |
| Processing | programming language & development environment for creation of images, animations & interactions | GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | Processing | GPL |
| Processing.js | processing visualization language ported to javascript | javascript | ||
| Raphaël | vector graphics javascript library | Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Chrome 5.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. | javascript | MIT license |
| JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit | tools for creation interactive data visualizations for the web, javascript w/example html | platform independent js library | javascript, html | |
| Protovis | javascript, SVG | BSD License | ||
| Google Public Data Explorer | upload datasets for visualization and exploration. | browser-based API | DSPL: Dataset Publishing Language | |
| Graphviz | graphs | Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS | Java | Common Public License Version 1.0 |
| prefuse | visualization framework for the Java programming language | Java | BSD License | |
| R | statistical computing and graphics | UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS | R | open source |
| SIMILE Widgets | Free, Open-Source Data Visualization Web Widgets, and More | BSD License | ||
| McIDAS-V | 3D geophysical data analysis and visualization | Windows, Linux, MacOS | Java, jython | GNU LGPL |
| Vis5D | Vis5D is a system for interactive visualization of large 5-D gridded data sets such as those produced by numerical weather models. | Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS | C | GNU GPL |
| VisAD | VisAD is a Java component library for interactive and collaborative visualization and analysis of numerical data. | Windows, Linux, MacOS | Java, jython | GNU LGPL |
| Octave | GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. | Octave | GNU GPL | |
| Tableau Public | Tableau Public includes a free desktop product that you can download and use to publish interactive data visualizations to the web. | Windows |