Weave open-source data visualization offers power, flexibility by Sharon Machlis.
From the post:
When two Boston-area organizations rolled out an interactive data visualization website last month, it represented one of the largest public uses yet for the open-source project Weave — and more are on the way.
Three years in development so far and still in beta, Weave is designed so government agencies, non-profits and corporate users can offer the public an easy-to-use platform for examining information. Want to see the relationship between low household incomes and student reading scores in eastern Mass.? How housing and transportation costs compare with income? Or maybe how obesity rates have changed over time? Load some data to generate a table, scatter plot and map.
In addition to viewing data, mousing over various entries lets you highlight items on multiple visualizations at once: map, map legend, bar chart and scatter plot, for example. Users can also add visualization elements or change data sets, as well as right-click to look up related information on the Web.
This story about Weave highlights different data sets than the last one I reported. Is this a where there’s smoke there’s fire type situation? That is to say that public access and manipulation of data has the potential to make a real difference?
If so, in what way? Will open access to data result in closure of secret courts? Or secret indictments and evidence? The evidence that has come to light via diplomatic cables, for example, is embarrassing for incompetent or crude individuals. Hardly the stuff of “national security.” (Sorry, don’t know how to embed a drum roll in the page, maybe in HTML5 I can.)