Our UI tools constantly grow more powerful. We collect massive amounts of data from countless sources. It is tempting to try and combine the heaps of data and show them in new and interesting ways.
Pioneers in this field call this idea Data Visualization.
Want some examples?
The spread of obesity in a large social network
Microsoft releases Descry
Project Descry demonstrates the power of data and information visualization as a communication tool. As a part of Descry, we are releasing a set of open source, web-based visualizations and an article written by the Jon Udell that serves as a broad introduction to the topic.
Microsoft has created a tool set to enable data visualization. They have created four sample Silverlight applications ‘The Visualizations’ for you to experiment with.
Here’s a screenshot of a Silverlight DeepZoom application called ‘A Website Named Desire.
For a sobering look at the fat epidemic in the US look at the The Obesity Epidemic
I was impressed with an animation in the ‘Their First Words‘ application. Check out how the information balloon rotates as your mouse moves horizontally across the screen.
This toolkit looks very promising.
Walt –
Thanks for the coverage!!
I wanted to clarify one thing – this is not a toolkit. In that, we aren’t providing a generic framework that you can just download, change a few things, and create brand new visualizations. This is because all the visualizations fall roughly in the “infographics” category, and those, by nature, are generally one-offs. Joshua covers that here –
http://www.visitmix.com/Articles/5-Tips-For-Building-Effective-Infographics.
Having said that, we’ll be making all the code available in the near future so you can dig in and figure out how to start building such infographics. It’s not as much “here are best practices to build infographics for the web” as it is, “here’s how we built these; hopefully, that can inspire you to build a few yourself”.
Nishant –
Thanks for the clarification.