Visualization Programming Languages, Software, and Toolkits

If you’ve seen websites such as, Digg Big Spy, We Feel Fine, or Gapminder. and you’re a web surfer you are probably amazed. If however, you’re a web designer or programmer you may be wondering how to accomplish these dramatic visualizations. Below you’ll find a list of visualization software, toolkits and programming languages to get you started.

Also, if you want to see or learn more about data visualizations please visit DesignDemo and VizLIst . I post visualizations on a daily basis in both of these sections.

Please use the comments section of this post to let the community know of any useful resources I’ve left out. Most of the descriptions below are taken from the developers of the example. Thanks, Max.

Visualization Programming Languages

Processing
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.

Visualization Software

OpenDX
The open source software project based on IBM’s visualization data explorer. If you need visualization for anything from examining simple data sets to analyzing complex, time-dependent data from disparate sources, OpenDX has what you need: features and functions that let you easily gain meaningful insight into your data.

Packet Garden
Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore. To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.

Visualization Toolkits

The Flare Visualization Toolkit
Flare is a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the Adobe Flash Player. Flare applications can be built using the free Adobe Flex SDK or Adobe’s Flex Builder IDE. Flare is based on prefuse, a full-featured visualization toolkit written in Java. Flare is open source software licensed under the terms of the BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Prefuse Visualization Toolkit
A Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications.

Enterprise Visualizations

i2
i2 Inc. is the leading worldwide provider of visual investigative analysis software for law enforcement, intelligence, military and Fortune 500 organizations.

Visualization Tools

Graph Gear - Graph Visualization Component
This is a very simple example of the graph gear component. The contents of simple.xml are rendered as an interactive graph through javascript to a flash component.

Many Eyes
Many Eyes is a visualization tool created by the Visual Communication Lab which is part of IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group. As they say on their website, “Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.”

Slife
Slife 1.3 offers a whole new way to keep track of what you do in your computer. Visualize your activities, improve your productivity and manage your time more efficiently. Slife observes everything you do in your computer and plots your activities in a graphical timeline. Its unique approach to activity tracking and time management opens up a world of possibilities.