Search Computing Blog

One of the research tracks within the Search Computing project deals with Visual Interfaces and User Interaction for Search Computing. There are plenty of JavaScript libraries out there for rendering data. This post lists 5 data visualization tools that we considered for our experiments and prototypal applications.

• The Javascript Information Visualization Toolkit: The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web. JIT supports multiple data representations (Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, etc), it works in the most recent versions of major browsers (IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+ ). JIT is licensed under the BSD License.

• Stanford Protovis: Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations. Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example.
• Flare: Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license.
• Processing.js: Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games. Processing.js is explicitly developed for browsers that support the HTML5 <Canvas> element. Processing.js runs in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but will not be supported in Internet Explorer until Mircosoft catch up with ISSUE 15.
• Raphaël: Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOMobject, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

copy right note: The content of this post has been  cut and pasted from the respective technologies’ Web sites, to increase their awarness.

ManyEyes is a IBM social networking application for data visualization, where one may share and visualize data sets via a social network.

With more than 20 data visualization types and  more than 100.000 publicly available data-sets, ManyEyes is a remarkable example of generic data visualization techniques adapted to heterogeneous data sources. Moreover, the available data-sets can be downloaded and used as data sources for mash-up applications.

More information on ManyEyes can be found on the project Web site.

As an increasing number of organizations feels the need to open up their data for public usage, it also arises the need for tools able to unlock the intrinsic  value of such data. Following a trend that already saw the creation of a public data search feature, Google Lab just launched the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool.

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Synesketch is a software library (Java API) for sensing and creative visualization of textual emotions. 

According to the project’s WIKI, Synesketch

is a result of a research that spreads out through several diverse fields – from natural language processing techniques based on WordNet, across Ekman’s research of emotions, to color psychology, visual design, data visualizations, and affective computing. Graphics were done by Processing, a great tool for programming visual art

uses a WordNet-based lexicon of words with emotional weights, and several NLP heuristic rules (e.g. emotional intensity of a sentence with emotional words is proportional to the number of exclamation marks at the end of the sentence). The algorithm transfers a (presumably small) chunk of text (e.g. basic unit of text in a chat conversation) into several emotional parameters … which defines emotional content of the text.

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The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently decided to release their transit data to the public. Examples of release data are about the subway, buses, railroads, etc.

The goal of MTA is to enable the creation of new mash-up services, such as the WayFinder Mobile Application for iPhone, an augmented reality application that has been designed to designed to help locating the nearest subway, bus or train stations.

Microsoft Live Labs recently launched  Pivot, a new tool to visually explore large sets of data. Gray Flake presented it at the latest TED Talk event.

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Below you can pre-view the new look of Google. Click to enlarge

Google's new look

Read more: http://www.taranfx.com/blog/googles-new-design-with-caffeine

Do you like to try it yourself? read out how http://www.taranfx.com/blog/try-new-google-search-caffeine

Image via Wikipedia

The IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering has just published a Special Issue of its Bulletin on “New Avenues in Search”.

Contents

Letters

• Letter from the Editor-in-Chief, David Lomet
• Letter from the Special Issue Editor, Sihem Amer-Yahia

Papers

• A Characterization of Online Search Behavior, Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins
• Kosmix: Exploring the Deep Web using Taxonomies and Categorization, Anand Rajaraman
• Flexible Querying of Personal Information, Amelie Marian and Wei Wang
• iMeMex: From Search to Information Integration and Back, Jens Dittrich, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles and Lukas Blunschi
• Challenges, Techniques and Directions in Building XSeek: an XML Search Engine, Ziyang Liu, Peng Sun, Yu Huang, Yichuan Cai and Yi Chen
• Searching Shared Content in Communities with the Data Ring, Serge Abiteboul, Neoklis Polyzotis
• The Social Future of Web Search: Modeling, Exploiting, and Searching Collaboratively Generated Content, Eugene Agichtein, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Hongyuan Zha

Google Base is a free service for submiting all kinds of content for Google to host and to make searchable online. It allows content providers to upload structured data to Google, surface it across Google search properties, and syndicate it via apis, gadgets and gadget ads.

Using the Google Base Data API, developers can programmatically access Google Base. Here’s some of the things you can do:

copy right note: The content was cut and paste from http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/base/ for the only purpose to increase the awarness of Google Base Data API.

Mamma is a “smart” metasearch engine – it’s like using multiple search engines, all at the same time. Founded in 1996, its one of the first and most popular search engines on the web today, with a rich history.

[Source http://www.mamma.com/]