One-stop shopping: prefuse, protovis, Tableau

• Toolkits
  • prefuse java toolkit
    hierarchies, graphs, timelines, scatterplots
    • flare actionscript/flash version
    • prefuse assistance pool forum
  • protovis

  • processing open-source java-like language for programming images, animation, and sound. think Flash+++. may or may not be appropriate.

  • ILOG
    supports parallel coordinates, parallel histograms, graphs/histograms/bar charts, dynamic queries, grids (small multiples), treemaps.

  • InfoVis Toolkit Java toolkit
    supports Time Series and Scatter Plots for tables, Node-Link diagrams, Icicle trees and Treemaps for trees, Adjacency Matrices and Node-Link diagrams for graphs. includes dynamic queries, double-edge sliders, distortion, etc.

  • JIT: JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

• Specific Tools
  • Tableau: Commercial version of Polaris. Trial version downloadable.

• Dimensionality Reduction
  • Glimmer, requires recent nVidia graphics card
  • MDS FSMvis tool from Morrison and Chalmers
  • XGvis MDS from AT&T
  • Isomap matlab
  • LLE matlab
  • SOM
  • VxInsight (software from cluster stability paper)
    Trial version apparently not distributed anymore, talk to me if you want me to try to get a version made available for us.

• Java: 2D graphics with Java2D, UI components with Swing
  Example apps:
  • Excentric Labels
  • Fisheye Menus
  • Table Lens
  • LifeLines

• Jazz/Piccolo: toolkits for zoomable interfaces (successor to Pad++), written in Java
  Example apps:
  • PhotoMesa
  • TimeSearcher
  • FaceFinder, 2003 course project, Rhian Davies

• ZVTM/ZGRViewer Zoomable Visual Transformation Machine, another Java zoomable interface toolkit/viewer
  Example apps:
  • Prawn, An Interactive Tool for Software Visualization 2003 course project, Andrew Chan / Reid Holmes

• Flash:
  Example apps:
  • MuniMap Berkeley student project
  • MusicMaps Berkeley student project

• X Windows:
  Example apps:
  • XGobi (high-dimensional data) [Tutorial]
  • VisDB (pixel-oriented database viz) [no source, no documentation]

• Scientific visualization packages
  • vtk: powerful and heavyweight scientific visualization dataflow toolkit
    • vtk graph drawing library docs, software
    • book

  • OpenDX: powerful and heavyweight scientific visualization dataflow toolkit
    • book

• OpenGL: extremely powerful and flexible graphics library
  • available on all platforms (free version for Unix is Mesa)
  • high learning curve
  • the "red book"
    • online from NCSA
    • online from UnReal
  • GLUT: multiplatform toolkit for handling platform-specific details
  
  Example apps:
  • XmdvTool: multivariate dataset exploration
  • H3: 3D hyperbolic graphs
  • Constellation 2D zoomable graphs [software not available]
  • Rivet: infovis toolkit behind Polaris, PipeCleaner (superscalar pipelines) [software not available]

• Geomview: lightweight visualization system/toolkit

• Graph drawing
  • Tulip handles large data
    strengths: scalability; power; free
    weaknesses: complexity/learning curve; installation can be irritating
  • graphviz static layouts of small data
    strengths: solid and robust (has been available for years); popular; quite easy to use
    weaknesses: no interaction, batch only; not scalable (does best with <500, don't try more than 5000); labels hard to read with all but very small graphs
  • Large Graph Layout
  • yfiles (evaluation version available)
  • AiSee (noncommercial/trial version available)
  • ILOG JViews commercial
  • Tom Sawyer commercial, trial available
  • Pajek, Windows-only
  • H3, 3D hyperbolic graphs through spanning trees, free for noncommercial use

  • stretch started out as class project [software not available]
  • protein-protein interaction graphs, student project

See also the InfoVis04 Workshop on InfoVis Software Infrastructures page

Data

One-stop shopping: Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository, data.gov, GapMinder

• Contests are great resources because they have not only data, but also tasks and examples of how others have tackled the problem. See the HCIL Benchmark Repository for a complete list.
  • VAST Contests
  • VAST Challenge 2009: internet traffic, social network with geographic component, video.
  • VAST Challenge 2008: Grand challenge: phone records for social network analysis, geotemporal records, wikipedia edit data/history (unstructured text analysis), location tracking (evacuation modelling).
  • VAST Contest 2007: Blue Iguanodon: News stories, blog entries, background info, multimedia materials.
  • VAST Contest 2006: Alderwood: News stories, background info, multimedia materials.
  • InfoVis Contests
    • InfoVis Contest 2007: Hollywood/IMDB
    • InfoVis Contest 2006: US Census PUMS Data
    • InfoVis Contest 2005: Market Data (not so useful since data not available)
    • InfoVis Contest 2004: Publication History
    • InfoVis Contest 2003: Tree Comparison
• Other Lists
  • data.gov: US Government central data repository
  • GapMinder data is all available for download
  • Jeff Klingner's List of Online Databases
  • Eamonn Keogh's Time Series Data Mining Archive
  • Heidi Lam Time Series Data list
• Networking project ideas
  • Visual Tcpdump: Tcpdump is a powerful tool that shows all network traffic on a link, but it can be quite hard to understand what's going on when confronted with the raw tcpdump output. "Visual tcpdump" would ideally run off either log file of a past tcpdump session or in realtime with live tcpdump connection. There are several tasks one might target from this dataset. First, visually characterizing traffic patterns - for example, showing the distribution of session lengths or packet types. Second, highlighting dangerous packets that could occur in a stream - for example, passwords sent in plain text. Third, characterizing protocols - for example, showing the TCP window size changes over the course of a session. Some previous knowledge of networking will be helpful for this project.
  • Intrusion Detection: Noticing that a network is under attack is difficult because of the sheer volume of benign traffic, and the number of attack methods. The two main tasks are real-time detection that an attack is occurring, and forensic analysis of a past attack. There is a publicly available dataset of network traces with four different simulated attacks plus a control baseline with no attacks. Previous knowledge of networking and security issues will be helpful for this project.
  • Internet Backbone: One way to map "the Internet" is to consider the structure of the backbone router interconnections. Bill Cheswick has been keeping archives of the daily changes in the roughly 100,000 core reachable routers for over three years. Even the static dataset from a single day is a difficult challenge to show comprehensibly, and showing growth and changes over time is an even more interesting problem. The H3 browser for large graphs is a potential resource. This project should be feasible without previous knowledge of networking.
• More Data
  • Mozilla Labs Test Pilot Tab Open/Close Study Data

• Functional Color, Maureen Stone
• Well-Formed Data, Moritz Stefaner
• Eager Eyes, Robert Kosara
• Visual Business Intelligence, Stephen Few
• infovis wiki, Vienna
• information aesthetics, Andrew Vande Moere
• visual complexity, Manuel Lima
• infovis.net newsletter, Juan C. Durstler
• Visuale, Enrico Bertini
• Statistical Graphics, Martin Theus
• heerforce one, Jeff Heer
• Information Wants to be Seen, TJ Jankun-Kelly
• Atlas of Cyberspaces, Martin Dodge

• Many-Eyes
• Swivel
• Gallery of Data Visualization