First Open Visualisation Workshop

See also the main Open Visualisation Workshops page and the general Open Visualisation page.

Contents

  1. First Open Visualisation Workshop
    1. Details
    2. Participants
    3. Programme
    4. Demos
      1. Martin Dittus, last.fm
      2. Julie Tolmie, KCL
      3. Jan Berkel, Trampoline Systems
      4. Jonathan Lister, Osmosoft
      5. Gregory Jordan, EBI
      6. David Aanensen, Imperial
      7. Jonathan Gray, OKF
      8. Concluding discussion
    5. Documentation
    6. Publicity
      1. www
      2. email

Details

Participants

  • Jonathan Gray, Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Martin Dittus, Last.fm
  • Jon Cowie, Trampoline Systems
  • Michele Mattioni, EBI
  • Jonathan Lister, Osmosoft
  • Richard Jennings, i2 Ltd
  • Julie Tolmie, King's College London
  • John O'Brien, Loughborough University
  • Gregory Jordan, EBI
  • David Aanensen, Imperial College
  • Jan Berkel, Trampoline Systems

  • Alf Eaton

  • Jamie Bullock, Birmingham Conservatoire
  • Adam Krause, Industrial Designer (OCAD)

Programme

  • Introduction
  • Planning
  • Demos:
    • Julie
    • David
    • Jonathan L.
    • Gregory
    • Jan
    • Martin
    • Jonathan G.
  • Lunch [good :)]
  • Package listing/discussion
  • Play around with several packages
  • Discussion about user interface, feature wishlist

Demos

Martin Dittus, last.fm

Julie Tolmie, KCL

  • Demonstrated visualisation work from her PhD thesis

    • http://www.tolmie.eu/diagramThesis.html

    • http://www.tolmie.eu/mathVis.html

    • http://www.tolmie.eu/

    • showed lattices made of rational point mapped onto a taurus
    • emphasised the potential value of visualisation in mathematics
    • her supervisor made ANU Graph and was making a colour version when she was working on her thesis
    • mathematica widely used
    • stumbled upon sequence discovered in c. 1806
    • visual notation for rational numbers
    • used tinderbox
    • wrote in C with a graphics handler
    • iteratively made various animations
  • Demonstrated work in game pattern analysis
    • discussion about different ways of exploring large documents - similarities between visualising relations between game elements and visualising citations, etc.
    • creating taxonomies from visualisations

Jan Berkel, Trampoline Systems

  • Demonstrated Tramposcope - a prototype in Prefuse for representing email data
    • received/sent email - composite number to represent frequency of communication
    • radial layout in prefuse, greys out depending on who is hovered over
    • builds up a tree
  • Demonstrated Enron Explorer
  • Demonstrated Sonar
  • Demonstrated Metascope - a tool for organisational consultants

    • http://www.trampolinesystems.com/product/Metascope/overview

    • network analysis
    • shows when themes occur in same context
    • done using Jung - which takes more effort to get nice visual results
    • 15-20k nodes will fall over (rendering too slow)
    • experiments with openGL
    • support and frameworks to do different kinds of zooming
    • how do you cluster?

Jonathan Lister, Osmosoft

Gregory Jordan, EBI

  • Demonstrated project to see how interactive you could get with java/processing

  • Demonstrated PhyloWidget

    • http://www.phylowidget.org/

    • comparing species - to see which are closer to others
    • spent a fair bit of time fiddling with the interface to get it right
    • Java Applet
    • possible to do a lot with javascript, but you lose power/functionality

David Aanensen, Imperial

  • Demonstrated eBURST
  • Demonstrated WebACT

Jonathan Gray, OKF

  • Gave a brief overview of the Open Knowledge Foundation and some of its projects

    • http://opendefinition.org/ - overview of work on open knowledge definition, standard for open data

    • http://ckan.net/ - a registry of open knowledge packages (which anyone can build upon - including with visualisation technologies)

    • http://www.openeconomics.net/ - open economic datasets with client side graphing tool

    • Weaving History - web application to allow people to string together 'factlets' into narratives organized by theme, time and space.

Concluding discussion

  • People found the workshop useful - and interested in having regular workshops
  • Didn't get very far with listing packages (or much else apart from discussion/demos) - but will follow up on mailing list and in future events
  • Would be useful to have documentation about different open source visualisation packages that are available - links to implementations, overviews, tips
  • Also interesting to list features that are desirable for different kinds of visualisation
  • More widespread promotion of list, as (as far as people are aware) there aren't any for general discussion of open (source) visualisation stuff
  • Spreading the word, inviting more colleagues
  • At future events, people can tinker away on visualisation projects - like a hackathon - and share their experience
  • Project(s) for group to work on - possibly one with OMDB/Prefuse
  • Another workshop in June?
    • domain specific hackathon (bioinformatics?)
    • trying out different packages with same dataset (possibly using omdb? open to suggestions. can look for open datasets on ckan.net.)
    • screencasts? create concise video walkthroughs of different visualisation projects with a voice over explaining what can be seen

Documentation

Please record any post-event documentation here (blog posts, photos, etc.) - so people can find links to any writeups, comments and further thoughts all in one place!

Publicity

Please record any pre-event announcements here - so we have a record of where to announce in future!

www

email

  • open-visualisation
  • okfn-discuss
  • ok-london
  • openlab
  • ggobi
  • vdg
  • graphviz-interest
  • view-theinfo
  • jisc-repositories
  • fc-uk
  • cc-uk
  • mysociety
  • public-lod
  • node.london
  • lonix