Visual Analytics -- Programming meets Art

Images provide an effective form of communicating information.From cave age men to gadget chimps of new era draw,use,share images as a medium of message and emotions.As time progressed we have gathered to process most of the information around us.So the data is large..immense and unimaginable... People use these bits to analyze,predict factors affecting the context.The area , Visual Analytics , I believe is one of the challenging fields for the information engineers.Visual analytics has been defined as "the science of analytical reasoning supported by the interactive visual interface.More ..


I have seen most blogs , web 2.0 sites having a visual element known as "tagcloud".Information is tagged and the visitor is informed with the relevance of the site with the level of occurence for each word.It creates a semantic space ... mmm like a cloud.Its merely a statistical visualization for the frequency of use of tagged words.Its a relevance-by-size lists.It thus provides a form of information filtering tool.I don't want to discuss more about the lexical analysis or polysemous distribution, but the power of visualization and the interactivity model. I came to know that a lot of interesting things happen in information graphics field.The one I came through was a project released IBM called ManyEyes.Essentially Many Eyes is a mashup machine for visualizing data! Here.They have a gallery of visualizations.The software engineering meets art.They uses Prefuse, a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations. Written by Jeff Heer, this toolkit supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. Also Google, provides an excellent API for visualization .

Robert Tappan Morris, the guy who developed the first worm was trying to map the total computers in the world.Interestingly, currently there is a project running to visualize the nodes around the globe !
Opte is a project that lets you graphically map the internet. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and aesthetics/art.


This graph is by far our most complex. It is using over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count.

Asia Pacific - Red
Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa - Green
North America - Blue
Latin American and Caribbean - Yellow
RFC1918 IP Addresses - Cyan
Unknown - White

Cool..