A topic I love watching out for is data visualisation and the tools available, including business intelligence, dashboards, key performance indicators, and other mechanisms to make sense of data using the well known phrase “an image is worth a thousand words.” and recently talked about Constellation Roamer and Desktop Dashboards for Business Intelligence.

Another such visualisation tool is from the Axiis team who are building a framework that “gives developers the ability to expressively define their data visualizations through concise and intuitive mark-up”. In this case, an image would probably serve the purpose quite well so let’s take this example from the Axiis website (I hope they don’t mind!).

 
Image Credit: Axiis Team

The image shows the W3schools.com Historical Browser Statistics with each colour bar being a browser version and the sweep being the period of time. You can tell instantly from this chart that Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox are the popular browsers used to visit the website. Each portion of the image can be further highlighted to view its source information. Presenting data visually in this way really helps to conceptualise the information, much more than a long list of data such as:

<month value="August 2009"> <browser name="IE7" share="0.151" month="August 2009"/> <browser name="IE6" share="0.136" month="August 2009"/> <browser name="IE8" share="0.106" month="August 2009"/> <browser name="Firefox" share="0.474" month="August 2009"/> <browser name="Chrome" share="0.07" month="August 2009"/> <browser name="Safari" share="0.033" month="August 2009"/> <browser name="Opera" share="0.021" month="August 2009"/> </month>

Built upon a development framework using Adobe Flex 3 and a graphics framework from Degrafa, Axiis have built an open source framework for data visualisation, and source files are freely downloadable to help you explore the framework and its possibilities further (the Flex 3 SDK will be required).

Learn more about Axiis and the Framework at http://axiis.org.