Monday, February 7, 2011

Three Interesting Data Analytics (and Visualisation) Things

Three interesting analytics finds online this week folks.

First, an article from the Guardian newspaper about the new publicly available "crime map" from the UK (www.police.uk):


It seems to me that the author misses the power of making data accessible and the real problem is that the data being made available here is overly curated.

The next two are both visualisation tools. Hipmunk (www.hipmunk.com) is a flight search tool that visualises flight availability in an interesting new way. Also their derived variable "agony" would be well worth understanding more (how can you define such a subjective measure?). Prof. Barry Smyth from UCD has an interesting review on his blog.

Finally (and thanks to Colman McMahon for pointing this one out), LinkedIn have launched a tool called LinkedIn Maps (inmaps.linkedinlabs.com) to help you visualise your professional network. Again it would be interesting to know how they choose node colours, sizes and positions relative to each other. A very interesting tool though.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the hipmunk.com shoutout! We go into a bit of detail about 'agony' sort when you mouseover the button, but the secret sauce algorithm behind it is guarded like the Hope diamond, only with more guard dogs, some of which shoot bees from their mouths.

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