I’ve long been a fan of MIT’s Exhibit as a tool for exploring and visualising data (including using it on more than one government data hack-day), so it was great to see David Karger presenting on the latest developments to the Exhibit tools (and some of the thinking behind it) at the first day of the Web Science event at the Royal Society.
Essentially, Exhibit (and associated projects) provide a set of visualisation elements you can use to display and explore all sorts of different data. Point Exhibit at a suitably formatted data-source and it can generate faceted browsing, timeline and mapping views of the data right inside the web browser – no server-side processing required.
I was particularly excited to see Datapress – a wordpress plug-in wrapping a user-interface around the process of creating an Exhibit – removing the need to touch any HTML and even able to feed off suitably formatted Google Spreadsheets as a data-source.
Below is a quick datapress Exhibit I’ve thrown together showing the datasets the CLG have released (based on yesterday’s data dump of data.gov.uk datasets). I limited it to just CLG datasets, as Exhibit is doing all it’s processing in the browser it can get a bit slow with more than 500 or so records – and in this case I’ve had to transform the data a bit myself to get it into a good format for Exhibit (php script here) – but given putting the interface together was a simple as embedding a photo in a WordPress blog I hope you can see which this is a pretty interesting tool.
{{Exhibit}} {{Footnotes}}
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