Google now offers a Public Data Explorer. This is another progressing Google Labs Project that looks quite usable yet. The datasets include, among others, minimum wage in europe, world development indicators etc.

Such public data visualizations are good examples of what can be achieved by information visualization. Such as, this small and easy created visual comparision of Agricultural land between the World and Austria lets users quickly examine that Austria’s agriculture is decreasing while the world’s one is still rising.

But have a look for yourself and create your own visualizations.

User Experience & Interaction Design are two of the most important issues when facing the current use of our World Wide Web. Though, most scientists and developers forget, that the Semantic Web and therefore also the Internet-Data’s Understanding is strongly connected with UE.

Within my future thoughts and projects I will be approaching the Semantic Web from more of a Interaction-Design or respectively user-focussed perspective. So obviously there are many interesting viewpoints to be taken into account when dealin with this wide-ranging issue.

The first question I stated was what are the different ways to look at this topic; here is a short answer to it:

Notes:

To begin with, I would like to use this post to note down a very incomplete listof professionals, conferences, symposia and institutes (which I may update from time to time), that are besides the obwvious ones, dealing with this topic somehow:

• iSchools iConference
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) – Sympoisum on Creative Intelligent Systems
• UC Berkeley School of Information
• Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)
• InfoVis C. – A data code compute resource
• A Timeline Visualization of Information History
• Information Aesthetics – Where form follows data – Blog
• DataVisualization.ch – Blog
• many many more

Catchphrases, Quotes & other thoughts:

concept of … highly adaptable … up-scaling views …

“Students shall choose projects with high societal payoffs, researchers have to employ the updated science 2.0 strategies, developers have to focus on genuine user needs”

Eventually, one of our best hopes for the future is that a large and connected group of people can change the world!”

Concept: Let us think of what should be achieved by 2020 and do something about it!

This weekend we have been to the Small Bösenstein (2395m) within the Niedere Tauern. Though there is not much snow these days in Styria, is was a nice skitouring day. Let me share some impressions with you:

[Show as slideshow]

While I am working on many projects dealing with information visualization, I would like to share a good online ressource about this research topic: IBM’s online visualization research site “MANYEYES“.

Finding the right way to view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental. We’re deliberately providing a wide array of possibilities since this is an experimental site—and expect to see more soon!

Their featured visualization types include: Network Diagrams, Word Clouds (also links to Wordle), Word Trees, Treemaps, but also the more standard ones as Bubble Charts, Piecharts and histograms, World Maps etc.

Reading through the information given to a specific visualization type (and component) you also find information about for which dataset is it best chosen. => Datasets, such as: unstructured text, proportions, hierarchical structures, continuous change, relationships etc.

Have fun trying some of them out!

Related Links:

• A quite small but also interesting research site dealing with this topic and using some the ManyEyes offerings to name is the The NYTimes’ Visualization Lab.
• Berkeley, University of California – Course Site: 294-10 Visualization
• http://vis.berkeley.edu/~maneesh/
• Martin Wattenberg’s site about Data visualization, Media art and Collective intelligence.

Dear readers,

thank you for reading my blog and I hope you did not wonder why I did not write for a longer time! Due to some work schedules and a sports-accident, I did not finish any blogpost about sports- and webscience-research-news. However, today I write again and would like to introduce two kind of funny terms I thought about while I was describing the difference between Wikipedia and Google to my father:

Most of us are “digital aborigins” and not “digital immigrants” as my parents for instance are. Therefore some terms are quite obvious clearer for us than maybe some relatives and/or aquaintances or even friends. There we may sometimes take sth. for granted but forget, that this knowledge is not as explicit as we thought it to be.

Therefore I would just like to remind you again of thinking sometimes in another perspective and thinking how others would perceive a situation. Some things will straighten out.

Some further readings:

• UI Design on Wikipedia
• GUI Bloopers (Book about user interface design “bloopers”: from dvarious information spaces, explaining how intelligent, well-intentioned professionals made these dreadful mistakes…)
• Only for the more into the SW people: Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)

Today I read about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for this year (2008). In a nutshell, this is a program which brings students and mentors within the area of Open Source Development together, worldwide.

As for the last years, Google is investing millions of dollars to finance open source development projects of all diiferent kinds; – and this year, 21 Drupal project fellowships have been selected to be granted. So what is Drupal?

“Drupal” is not only a publishing content management system but also a steadily evolving base for web-platforms with a big community as driving power. The core is advancing rapidly, so OpenId and new import/export possibilities, many semantic and social network features are becoming part of both the core api as well as system-modules, which can be easily plugged in / integrated later on…

Here you can look up the list of financed Drupal projects within the Google Summer of Code 2008.

I stumbled upon a new web 2.0 platform which maintains being an upcoming “web 3.0″-site, namely TWINE. Some people already tried to find out what this platform’s goal of being or respectively becoming a web 3.0-site really means: There is a not transparent use of some ontology/taxonomy mapping in the backend to further enhance their two-dimensional stored “data about data” seen in the widgets on the platform. But it is quite unclear what Twine’s focus next to becoming a big web2.0 platform is, to really call it a better platform than those we alreday find in WWW today … but I think it is worth having a look at this platform in the next months.

I also stumbled upon a publication about “Web Science” and would like to share this one with some of my blog’s readers or other intersted party: Its title is “A Framework for Web Science” and its is freely avaible as Open Journal PDF on the now publisher homepage.
Abstract:

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

Further Readings:

• My recommendation to begin with: “Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science”(by Ben Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM, June 2007/Vol. 50, No. 6)
• “Web Science Research Initiative” (WSRI) – Homepage
• Article on Thinking Space – Blog about Web 2.0 Summit Conference
• “Web Science & Web Technology”- course homepage on TU Graz
• “Semantic Focus” – a “Thoughts on the Semantic Web” – Blog

Hibernate is an object relational mapping (ORM) and is getting more and more the open source standard for Java database persistence and query services.

Today, I write about Hibernate because I stumbled upon some statistics (cmp. figure below) from the job-search-engine “Indeed.com“, that shows that the term “Hibernate” is more and more often used in Job Descriptions for (Java-, Web-) Developers.

* This job trends graph shows the percentage of jobs we find that contain your search terms.

If you are interested and don’t know the general facts about Hibernate, let me introduce you to Hibernate and Eclipse in a separate article about “Hibernate” and also a short article about a “Short history of Java Web Frameworks“.

“Creativity@Work”: Some weeks ago (on 25th April 2007) there was the final presentation or respectively the project close-out’s event of a last year’s project on creativity called “Neurovation“. The Neurovation project is presented at http://www.neurovation.at. The presentations are available as PDF and some pictures can also be found there.