The other day I met with Mr.Takasuka. He founded Cybozu, Inc., one of the Japanese first Web-based groupware products company. In 2006 he also founded LUNARR in the USA.

There a new paradigm shift suddenly occured to me in the area of Data Visualization.
“Is the brain process of organizing new ideas the same as that of visualizing data?”
Actually my research theme is “Auto Generaion of Visualization from Data Scheme”.

To create new ideas, find a cut edge of things first

“If you want to create new ideas, it’ll be better for you to find a cut edge (one logical aspect) of things and expand it than to try to think of big ideas. Because the biggest power exists in the point where ideas and cut edges are balanced.” I got this message from his talk.

That is to say, it is easy to get new ideas by organizing things with some creative tools: “brain frameworks”.

For example, think about this case, creates a new laser machine (Mr.takasuka worked for Matsushita = Panasonic). Laser is point and line. The opposite of a point is a flat and the opposite of a line is a curve. After dividing split these aspects in four, quadrant, go through each quadrant in order to get new ideas. When he saw flat and curve quadrant, it means that the light is always reflected (curve) and shown on a screen (flat), he came up with a new projector with a mirror. By reflecting the light on the mirror put between the screen and the projector it can project images on the screen even when it is not put in front of the screen.

In this case, he used a tool. He called it “2x(by)2″, which I call “matrix”, because it is two-dimension chart with two axes. The point is that you come up with new ideas more easily when structuring thoughts.

» 事業を考える切り口 - Toru Takasuka の起業・経営ブログ [ja]

» 新しい concept のはじまり - Toru Takasuka の起業・経営ブログ [ja]

Editorial techniques taught in Matsuoka Seigo’s edit school

I once experienced an idea-training like this at Matsuoka Seigo’s edit school [ja]

It’s similar to the case study training among management consultants but I really enjoyed it because its purpose was to liberate my ideas not limited to MECE (Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive: consultants often use MECE). I found six tools in the brochure of the school.

1. Combination (一種合成型)
Combines two things to generate new idea.

2. Triple Jump (三間連結型)
Expands ideas in three stages like hop-step-jump. (ex. small-medium-large, past-now-future)

3. Branching(二点分岐型)
Branchs one thing to two. “Branding” is used as an aspect in the example.

4. Trinity (三位一体型)
Three-piece set organization. Marketing 3C and Hegel’s aufheben must be the examples.

5.1 All Around (二軸四方型1)
Branches one thing to four dicrections.

5.2 2×2 (二軸四方型2)
Set things in each cells divided by two axeses. It is called “Matrix” and “2×2″.

The relationship between organizing ideas and Data Visualization

Well, let’s get down to business. My paradigm shift is that when I organize ideas I use the same brain process as the one in visualizing data.

I think that “how to think easily” will have the same meaning of “how to visualize plainly” for our brains. The word “Data Visualization” strikes us as Computer Science while the visualizing process is similar to our brain procedure when we chart our thinkings to a diagram.
1. Think about concrete objects to deal with.
2. Create data collection by dividing the objects into one aspect.
3. Visualize the data.
The Data Visualization process above probably equals to “constructive thinking” Takasuka-san called.

Today Data Visualization focuses on these questions: what types of visualization are there? how should we program it? Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment mainly introduces the algorithms of programming visualization.

Conclusion

This paradigm shift makes me feel that I can create a new visualization method from not only visualization type but also data schema. If I got a concrete good implementation I would be able to propose a new convictive method of Data Visualization.

NOTE: This story must be very abstract so I will write a more concrete article referring to Semantic Web next time.

Reference

The diagram lists varied charts regarding each objective. You may be able to use it as cheat sheet.

» Chart Suggestions - A Thought Starter

Recently I have spent a lot of time investigating Data Visualization framework/library to develop a new visualization library that generate automatically rich interfaces from various data.

» 20 Fresh JavaScript Data Visualization Libraries

List-up articles such as the above help me with the research, but almost all of the libraries are used only for charts in the wide Data Visualization area. When we say charts, we may remember only about eight kinds of charts. It’s not amusing! In our daily life, we are exposed to more visualizations like a map, catalog, newspaper, and beautiful art works, not only charts.

So I listed up famous frameworks that are not narrowed down to charts: treat Data Visualization more fundamentally.

SIMILE Widgets Exhibit

This is a framework for a faceted search released by MIT Media lab. Template languages extending HTML enables rich search result interfaces. It has supported List, Table, Map, Timeline, Timplot as widgets so far. Exhibit builds up elaborate data source so visitors which visit the site using it can change the interface by switching the tabs and manipulate the adequate search functions they want.

SIMILE Widgets project offers Timeline, Timeplot and Runway(Coverflow) as independent APIs. These including Exhibit are developed as an opensource software now.

» SIMILE Widgets Exhibit - US President Search DEMO

ProtoVis

ProtoVis is a visualization framework developed by Stanford Visualization Group. Unlike other visualization libraries which separate each visualization (ex.bar chart, line chart, map and others), it treats in more detail parts like a line, a point and a circle and develop a visualization combining these parts. It may be similar to Processing.js. You can make a visualization with a lot of flexibility using examples from DEMOs.

» ProtoVis DEMO

Prefuse Flare (Flash)

Prefuse Flare based on Prefuse is a famous Data Visualization framework too. Though Prefuse itself was for Java, Flare is implemented with Flash. Becuase it designs elaborately  data structure as SIMILE does, this framework is so flexible that it is easy to switch visualizations and to import new visualizations. Neat interaction and animation by Flash are also good points.

» Flare DEMO

Style Chart

This is a framework in which the server generates visualization images when it receives a request from client. If you are afraid that you can’t deal interaction because of image,  don’t worry. Style Chart enables interaction with javascript. It is rare to have radar chart (spider chart).

» Style Chart Editor(DEMO)
» Style Chart Gallery

CanViz

CanViz is a javascript version framework of Graphviz: famous Data Visualization framework. It is maily adequate for graph data. Bad point is that we couldn’t set up animation and action as far as I can see DEMO. It seems to be a framework just for visualizing data.

» CanViz DEMO

Axiis (Flex)

This is a framework using Adobe Flex. Interactive actions are elaborately build. The following DEMO “Browser Statistics” atracted attention. Axiis has greate latitude like ProtoVis and Prefuse Flare so we can develope various kinds of visualization.

» Axiis - Browser Statistics DEMO

Infovis

Infovis is a famous library for drawing graph data. It offers each visualization independently: has five visualizations. Basically Infovis treats only graph data including tree data but it enables us to show weighted graph (the connections among the nodes are weighted: thin or bold) / directed graph data (the connections has a direction: -> or <-).

By the way I don’t know the relationship with InfoVis Toolkit

» Infovis DEMO

RGraph

RGraph is a framework using HTML5. It will be difficult to adopt RGraph because of HTML5 but it has high-quality visualizations so it must be a promising framework.

» RGraph DEMO

Nowadays, I have an impression that many web applications have new types of user interface. For example, GAPMINDER is one of them. This shows a chart of varied statistics.

“How do you display it very plainly?” This question has been more popular now. What types of new web application interface are there? In this article I would like to report the survey.

2D (two dimensions)

There seem to be two fundamental interface types. One is a 2D and the other is 3D. The problem of 2D approach might be how we show varied data in a flat display,  that is, a web browser.

Applications That Uses Massive Amaounts of Data

Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared will become ubiquitous. The former is an application which shows various statistical data with some comprehensible charts and graphs. The amount of data appears to be over 10TB. It is also well known as a product produced by Wolfram who made Mathematica. In contrast, Google Squared uses grid type interface like a spreadsheet. By this layout we can compare the data among some results, for example, digital camera’s specs. It seems to be an good way of using Goolge’s vast whole data on the web. It may be that Google Squared terrorizes vertical-search companies as Google Analytics cleaned out access-log companies [Conclusion]
-> Search Engines
These types of applications are likely to be search engines because they treat a large amount of information. So the interface will calm down into graph charts like Google’s statistics graph. Instead there might be room for improvement in user interface such as how to put a query or a way of search.

Applications That Visualize Correlation Among Data Items

Many search engine applications aren’t attempting data visualization method, just a table or a list of charts. The graph-structure is used generally to visualize the correlation among data items . The most famous application might be mixigraph, which shows the correlations among mixi users. In real world we are familier with the type of the graph which has some nodes and the connections between two nodes. In the web there is a large correlation analysis market.

[Conclusion]
->Recommendation Engine.
Major methods used by many reccomendation engines is to recommend the related items when you look a item (ex. book, game, music video and so on). Deqwas produced by Scigineer recommends related items which suit your taste, by finding your community.

After all mixigraph is perhaps one of recommendation engines because we usually use it to find common friends and friends who is near us. For this reason many recommendation engines adopt such graph-like interface.

Supporting Graphical Interface of Statistics Data.

Google Visualization API is an useful Web API when we show some data on the web. Simply if we post data to the server and we can get some graph images. In terms of applications which help us graph data, I would say that web-site access analysis softwares such as Google Analytics and Nakanohito belong to this category.

[Conclusion]
-> API and ASP/SaaS
We will continue to ask for comprehensive visual data and a simple way of showing them. API and ASP/SaaS are probably most suitable ways of realizing that.

Organization of Our Brain

These are applications to organize our thinking such as mind map tools. Though there are more than 20 varieties of applications as I know, they have tree structure in common. Above all I like Frieve Editor. With Frieve Editor I can build a graph structure. It is very useful when I make a note.

[Conclusion]
->Cognitive Science
This area also includes interactive presentation makers (e.g prezi), or dataflow makers (e.g. Office Visio). It is because they have been aiming one goal, efficient use of brain. So these brain supporting tools will be related to Cognitive Science.

３D (three dimentions)

There is other direction of UI distinctively different from graphical directions: 3D. It lets people convert the mind from “write down images on the paper” into “move in the space” and many interactive applications have been launched. iFree3D is an application for browsing web in a cube world. It leverages 3D to work out intuitive control of web pages, images and so on. FoxTab, Firefox addon, also shows web pages in 3D way.

[Conclusion]
->Web Browser
These 3D applications are web browsers or web browser plugins in common. It may be natural approach that a web browser helps us to move like in the real world. Paradigm shift will occur in the power relationships of web browsers in the near future.

Consideration

In this manner there are a lot of cross-sectoral approaches and applications which have unique interfaces. I think these cover all post-web2.0 trends. Probably this means that new innovative interfaces are already becoming essential for new innovative applications.

[Reference]
The following blog divides many data visualization approaches into  7 ways.

≫ Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics | Smashing Magazine

• Mindmaps
• Displaying News
• Displaying Data
• Displaying connections
• Displaying Web-sites
• Articles & Resources
• Tools and Services

The other day I found an interesting news about a new application similar to a web browser. In Palo Alto (and the rest of the world) articles about the ChromeOS launch were all over the news, meanwhile Microsoft announced the alpha release of “Pivot” in obscurity.

» Pivot: Microsoft’s experiment to ‘view the Web as a web’

the team is describing the goal of the Pivot project is to enable users to view the Web as a “web” rather than a series of isolated pages.

From this concept and the following movie, I can put the features of Pivot into 3 points.

• Faceted search which enables refining and sorting the search result
• Transparency between local files and the files on the internet
• Rich visualization

» Learn More about Pivot | Microsoft Pivot

Personally I like “Wikipdeia Collections” at 2:30 of the movie. I can’t decide wheter it is convenient or not unless I use it, though, the way of organizing and visualizing data simply will head down the right path on the next web.

So grouping data may be very important, Pivot classifies items into three types of groups listed below, “Collections” like sets in mathematics.

• Simple Collections
• Linked Collections
• Dynamic Collections

However, if you don’t use Windows Vista or 7, .NET Framework 3.5 and IE8, you couldn’t be an user of Pivot. That’s how Microsoft is.

Be that as it may, HTML5 have became popular in Japan recently and there will be more applications of fuzzy concepts between web browser and web application. Incidentally I am going to attend two events related to HTML5.

» HTML5 Tech Talk on November 2009[jp]

» HTML5 meeting at Opera[jp]