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:

1. SWIVEL – See, Understand and Share Data
2. Tableau – Visualize and Share Your Data
3. Verifiable – Share Your Data. Learn from Others.
4. Visualcomplexity – Resource Space for Visualization of complex networks
5. and last but not least of course the already mentioned: Many Eyes – for shared visualization and discovery

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.