Weave Visualization Software Released
The visualization platform Weave Version 1.0 Beta was released this month by the Open Indicators Consortium and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. 
I manage the data end of the project, and and I'm rather proud of the results of this team effort, which has occupied a lot of my time and attention lately.
If you are part of an organization that has a need to present statistics or information graphically on the Web, you can download the Weave application and install it on your computer or on a network server, but if you just want to work or play interactively with visualizations that others have created using Weave, all you need is your browser. Various partners in the project are now putting up websites on their areas of interest for the public to access.
You can see and interact with one live sample of a Weave visualization (Obesity in the US) on the demo page of the OIC Weave website, and I have placed two visualizations of a recently-released life expectancy study, which has made a big splash in the mainstream press (e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615)at http://halfredhouse.biz/WeaveLifeExpectancy.html Most of the coverage of the study has emphasized the fact that there are widespread pockets of the US where women's life expectancy has been falling since 1997, but there are many other nuggets to be mined from the study, which lists a set of countries with comparable life expectancies for each county. If you experiment with the interactive capabilities of the visualizations, you can find some of them for yourself.
I manage the data end of the project, and and I'm rather proud of the results of this team effort, which has occupied a lot of my time and attention lately.
If you are part of an organization that has a need to present statistics or information graphically on the Web, you can download the Weave application and install it on your computer or on a network server, but if you just want to work or play interactively with visualizations that others have created using Weave, all you need is your browser. Various partners in the project are now putting up websites on their areas of interest for the public to access.
You can see and interact with one live sample of a Weave visualization (Obesity in the US) on the demo page of the OIC Weave website, and I have placed two visualizations of a recently-released life expectancy study, which has made a big splash in the mainstream press (e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615)at http://halfredhouse.biz/WeaveLifeExpectancy.html Most of the coverage of the study has emphasized the fact that there are widespread pockets of the US where women's life expectancy has been falling since 1997, but there are many other nuggets to be mined from the study, which lists a set of countries with comparable life expectancies for each county. If you experiment with the interactive capabilities of the visualizations, you can find some of them for yourself.