data visualisation for the masses

In this week's Nature, Declan Butler has a short piece on two sites that combine data set storage and visualisation: Swivel and IBM's Many Eyes.

The idea is to make data analysis more democratic, as tools such as Google Earth have done for geographic visualization, says Fernanda Viégas of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We want to provide the masses with access to visualization tools, especially interactive ones," she says. Governments, international agencies and research organizations generate huge silos of publicly available data on almost every aspect of society, but the public has never been able to explore, share and discuss these data sets easily, she points out.

Data sharing: the next generation, by Declan Butler
Nature 446, 10-11 (1 March 2007) | doi:10.1038/446010b; Published online 28 February 2007

Previously:
December 06, 2006  share your data online using Swivel