Data Visualization for the Masses
There are a few websites/startup companies trying to fly the idea of being a repository and visualization engine for data that anyone can upload. Swivel, for example, made some splash in the past few months as the “youtube for data”.
I experimented with Swivel and a few others. The main problem with all of them is the lack of tools allowing conditioning, at least in an easy way. Conditioning is important for constructing small multiple plots, or even plotting groups in different colors in scatter plot. For example, take the ideal point data I uploaded:
In order to different parties in different colors I would have (as far as I know) to upload a different dataset for each party! It goes without saying that this is unnecessarily burdensome.
Many Eyes is also very impressive, with more advanced visualization plots. It is java based, and does not play so nicely in firefox at the mac, unfortunately. I also had problems with the ideal points dataset there. It doesn’t allow one to create a scatter plot with only two variables (!!!) requesting a third to be displayed as the size of the symbols.
The focus on bar charts on both platforms is also annoying… dotplots and boxplots would be nice.
There is another site data360, but I didn’t have much luck. It is more “professional”, allowing one to pull data directly from the web automatically. But its focus on time series data makes it simply unusable for the example I tried.
Of course, all three are just beginning and we might be hearing a lot about them soon. And the graphs they make are not half bad. Not until you consider rich chart live, that is. This one is ugly! And I mean, it makes you miss excel kind of ugly:
Hi There,
Your point about conditionals is a really good one. In fact, pre generating all the most intuitive conditionals is at the heart of why we created Swivel (and named it Swivel as in pivot). We have some work to do before we get the interaction right and build out the necessary features. The fact that you were looking for it and couldn’t find indicates how far we have to go.
However, you can see a hint of it now.
For example if you click on this page: http://swivel.com/data_columns/show/2003888 you are actually looking at what we call a Category Pivot Column. In this case it is conditioned on a person’s name equaling Dmitry. You’ll see that all the line and bar graphs are conditioned on that value.
Importantly, that logic is done from the original data table, which looks like this: http://swivel.com/data_sets/spreadsheet/1003146. As you can see the data is all compressed. But Swivel is smart enough to parse it into the proper conditions for you.
On any data set in Swivel like this one http://swivel.com/data_sets/show/1003146 you can drill into a column like person http://swivel.com/data_columns/show/2003880 then into a particular person like Dmitry Dimov http://swivel.com/data_columns/show/2003888.
Thanks again for the post. I hope you can tolerate the longish reply.
Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com