Recently, a num­ber of inter­est­ing online tools for quan­ti­ta­tive data visu­al­iza­tion popped up:

swivel.com

“…is a place where curi­ous peo­ple explore all kinds of data.” (tag line) It allows any­body to upload, visu­al­ize and share data sets. The dia­grams can be embed­ded in any web page by using HTML snip­pets. I haven’t fig­ured out yet if these update auto­mat­i­cally, when the data set changes. If so, this is a really neat way to dis­play dynamic graphs on your page. And the whole sharing/discussing data aspect is really interesting.

reinvigorate.net

My favorite online web site ana­lyt­ics tool, which I totally for­got about, because it has been offline for two years or so. But the relaunch was really worth the wait, nice style, except for the glossy but­tons (WHY?), the col­ors and visual ideas are really good. Also feature-wise, it eas­ily puts google ana­lyt­ics behind — trend analy­sis with poly­no­mial fit­ting, real-time analy­sis, in-depth stats etc. I rec­om­mend test­ing it out if you are a stats junkie as I am.

IBM: many eyes

Looks a lot like swivel, except there are far more visu­al­iza­tion options and the dia­grams are inter­ac­tive (Java though — hrrr). Haven’t looked at it in depth yet, but it looks very inter­est­ing as well.

A very nice paper on the “laissez-faire librar­i­an­ship” often asso­ci­ated with tag­ging vs. more struc­tured seman­tic web approaches. Most notable is that the dis­cus­sion is put in the con­text of Husserl’s the­ory of reflec­tions, inten­tion­al­ity and intersubjectivity.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SEMANTIC WEB AND USER-CENTERED TAGGING SYSTEMS

D. Grant Camp­bell Fac­ulty of Infor­ma­tion and Media Stud­ies Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Ontario
Lon­don, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada

Abstract This paper uses Husserl’s the­ory of phe­nom­e­nol­ogy to pro­vide a model for the rela­tion­ship between user-centered tag­ging sys­tems, such as del.icio.us, and the more highly struc­tured sys­tems of the Seman­tic Web. Using three aspects of phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal theory—the move­ment of the mind out towards an entity and then back in an act of reflec­tion, mul­ti­plic­i­ties within unity, and the shar­ing of inten­tion­al­i­ties within a community—the dis­cus­sion sug­gests that both tag­ging sys­tems and the Seman­tic Web fos­ter an inter­sub­jec­tive domain for the shar­ing and use of infor­ma­tion resources. The Seman­tic Web, how­ever, resem­bles tra­di­tional library sys­tems, in that it relies for this inter­sub­jec­tive domain on the con­scious imple­men­ta­tion of domain-centered stan­dards which are then encoded for machine pro­cess­ing, while tag­ging sys­tems work on implied prin­ci­ples of emergence.

As promised, here is an update to the tag maps appli­ca­tion I intro­duced below along with some explanations.

For the impa­tient: HERE’S THE LINK

(Update again: The lat­est ver­sion can be found here)

And for the curi­ous: Here’s the expla­na­tions: (more…)

For my the­sis, I am work­ing on inter­faces for the socio-semantic web. How can we exchange struc­tured infor­ma­tion snip­pets (“micro­con­tent”) and meta­data in small com­mu­ni­ca­tion cliques via RSS — and what inter­faces do we need for that?

One really hot per­spec­tive here is the search for infor­ma­tion from a net­work of trusted sources, and this is exactly what the peo­ple at Stan­ley James’ com­pany lijit do. They pro­vide you with a per­son­al­ized search engine, which returns google results only from

• - your own pub­lished infor­ma­tion (via your blog, pub­lic book­mark­ing tools, flickr, photo shar­ing, etc.)
• - plus infor­ma­tion pub­lished or marked as “good” from peo­ple you trust

So in a nut­shell, you can search your own net­work (“What have peo­ple I know book­marked or pub­lished about the new iPhone?”) or other people’s net­works (“Stan is the expert on social net­works — let’s see what he and his friends have book­marked or pub­lished about it.”)

This is def­i­nitely quite stim­u­lat­ing. It still has to turn out in which sit­u­a­tions a per­sonal net­work search is far supe­rior to the global web search or a per­sonal, local search on my own resources and if peo­ple will adopt it. But I have the strong intu­ition that they are fill­ing a huge gap here: con­nect­ing peo­ple and con­tents on web scale inde­pen­dent of indi­vid­ual book­mark­ing or pub­lish­ing tools. This is kind of a meta-service for what comes after Web 2.0.

You can try search­ing my net­work here:

Lijit Search