Data Visualisation with Ajax
I’m very interested in using Ajax to bring complex data to life. The added interactive element can turn potentially dry subjects into something compelling. We’re busy doing this sort of thing at Historic Futures, using Ajax to tell the story behind consumer products.
I’m delighted to see that force-directed graphs (they of the old Java 1.0 GraphApplet demo) have made their way to Ajax, courtesy of Kyle Scholz. Check out the demo linking Amazon’s web services to an interactive graph UI. In a similar vein, the Simile project at MIT have released a interactive timeline widget for visualising data in chronological sequence.
Both sites have several demos in addition to the ones I’ve linked to, and are well worth a browse.