Lazy D3 on some astronomical data by simonraper.
From the post:
I can’t claim to be anything near an expert on D3 (a JavaScript library for data visualisation) but being both greedy and lazy I wondered if I could get some nice results with minimum effort. In any case the hardest thing about D3 for a novice to the world of web design seems to be getting started at all so perhaps this post will be useful for getting people up and running.
The images above and below are visualisations using D3 of a classification hierarchy for astronomical objects provided by the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance). I take no credit for the layout. The designs are taken straight from the D3 examples gallery but I will show you how I got the environment set up and my data into the graphs. The process should be replicable for any hierarchical dataset stored in a similar fashion.
Even better than the static images are various interactive versions such as the rotating Reingold–Tilford Tree, the collapsible dendrogram and collapsible indented tree . These were all created fairly easily by substituting the astronomical object data for the data in the original examples. (I say fairly easily as you need to get the hierarchy into the right format but more on that later.)
Easier to start with visualization of standard information structures and then move onto more exotic ones.