Seeing Rich Visualization through the Data Forest

Seeing Rich Visualization through the Data Forest

An emerging class of interactive visualization applications and techniques are converging art and science to create stunning—and incredibly useful—visualizations of complex information. These powerful visual analytics solutions enable a more thorough understanding and provide actionable insights into previously overwhelming data sets.

Leading this evolving marketplace, Barcelona-based Bestiario has dedicated its work to the creation of spaces for the collection presentation of knowledge. Working based on the mantra of “making the complex comprehensible,” the company creates interactive information spaces in a powerful framework based on graph theory, advanced topological algorithms, and modeling and geographic representations that enable insightful analysis of a wide range of abundant data sources.

Bestiario partnered with Zemoga to design the Hoorray Mozaic, an online photo collection that catalog’s users’ uploaded photographs based on the relationships of each image. Using the metadata from each photo, including name and event tagging, dates, times, album names, etc., the site creates a spatial relationship view of all the images, rather than a scroll-through matrix. Similar to the concept behind “six degrees of separation” or the

As modern data collection and hardware technologies evolve to gather, process, and store a mind-bogglingly immense amount of data, it becomes increasingly challenging for humans to fully analyze and comprehend this information. To create consumable, actionable information, innovative companies from around the world are developing a class of advanced data visualization technologies. They are delivering intuitive, graphical representations from raw data and exploring

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nAn award-winning

designer and developer of interactive solutions, Alejandro Gomez is the co-founder of Zemoga

and a recognized industry leader in the

fields of user-centric design and technology

solutions.

By: Alejandro GomezPresidentZemoga

“human web,” the graphical presentation allows users to see and better understand the relationships between their friends, events, and other correlations based on the quantitative metadata associated with each image. This groundbreaking approach to data visualization by association could be applied in other social spaces as well, as a visual comparison of trending topics on Twitter or relational visualization of Facebook status updates, which could have tremendous potential for marketers and others who study consumer behavior.

In another project that promises to revolutionize urban public transportation, Zemoga partnered with Field Office of Clemson, SC to develop the Bicing community bicycle program platform in Barcelona. The Bicing program itself is a shared bicycle rental program that allows users to pick up and return bikes at various stations positioned around the city to provide convenient and affordable climate-friendly transportation.

To make the program more appealing, convenient, and enticing for users, Field Office and Zemoga designed the Bicing.com platform to provide real-time availability and location data overlaid on a city map. The Zemoga-designed interface leverages the data from each bike to display each vehicle as a red dot on the Barcelona street map. With each bike equipped with a GPS sensor device, visitors to the site can see a graphical snapshot of where bikes are available, and even watch those in use as they travel on their journey. Some are even outfitted with a webcam, allowing Bicing.com visitors to see what the rider sees along their path.

The interface is not only fun and informational for Bicing users, but it also has tremendous potential for the future of traffic analysis. By tracking each vehicle, patterns in movement and usage begin to emerge that can allow city planners and transportation officials to analyze traffic patterns and behaviors beyond tedious and less-than-insightful number crunching. The same concept could be easily applied to municipal bus routes, rental cars, and virtually any other form of transportation.

This kind of cutting-edge data visualization—beyond traditional quantitative analysis—is becoming a tremendously powerful tool in the discovery of all types of knowledge. The proliferation of mobile devices puts the power of knowing and sharing where we are, what we’re seeing, and what we’re thinking right in the palm of our hands. In truth, we as a mobile society are generating massive amounts of data—data that can be used to better understand the world around us and ourselves as human beings.

This article originally appeared in the 2011 SoDA DMO report.

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