Interactive Data Visualization using D3.js, DC.js, Nodejs and MongoDB by Anmol Koul.
From the post:
The aim behind this blog post is to introduce open source business intelligence technologies and explore data using open source technologies like D3.js, DC.js, Nodejs and MongoDB.
Over the span of this post we will see the importance of the various components that we are using and we will do some code based customization as well.
The Need for Visualization:
Visualization is the so called front-end of modern business intelligence systems. I have been around in quite a few big data architecture discussions and to my surprise i found that most of the discussions are focused on the backend components: the repository, the ingestion framework, the data mart, the ETL engine, the data pipelines and then some visualization.
I might be biased in favor of the visualization technologies as i have been working on them for a long time. Needless to say visualization is as important as any other component of a system. I hope most of you will agree with me on that. Visualization is instrumental in inferring the trends from the data, spotting outliers and making sense of the data-points.
What they say is right, A picture is indeed worth a thousand words.
The components of our analysis and their function:
D3.js: A javascript based visualization engine which will render interactive charts and graphs based on the data.
Dc.js: A javascript based wrapper library for D3.js which makes plotting the charts a lot easier.
Crossfilter.js: A javascript based data manipulation library. Works splendid with dc.js. Enables two way data binding.
Node JS: Our powerful server which serves data to the visualization engine and also hosts the webpages and javascript libraries.
Mongo DB: The resident No-SQL database which will serve as a fantastic data repository for our project.
[I added links to the components.]
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A very useful walk through of interactive data visualization using open source tools.
It does require a time investment on your part but you will be richly rewarded with skills, ideas and new ways of thinking about visualizing your data.
Enjoy!