I tried out comparisons like “night,day” and “apple,microsoft”. A funny one was the comparison between “bush,obama”. Look at the screenshot below or jsut try out the tool for yourself : TwitterSpectrum
The tool was created by J.Clark who also published articles on data mining, statistical analysis and visualization and created other visualization tools. For further information you may scan his weblog.
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. 
While readig through the latest entries of my subscribed rss-news-feeds I stumbled upon an interesting collection of three websites that are presenting data visualization of all kinds. Here is a list:
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:
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:
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!
If you do not know yet what is possible to dynamically visualize with JavaScript, habe a look at this nice online-demo-collection (Google Chrome optimized). For example, one demo is a Starfield simulation and the Google Gravity demo.
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!
I'm an information designer within the
huge jungle of data and metadata.
Physically, I live in Austria,
and love many kinds of sports.
... more about me
