IBM's Many Eyes

K Soujanya (10BM60039) & P Ramya Krishna (10BM60056)

This post introduces one of the most popular graphical visualization tools - Many Eyes backed by IBM.

First, Let us see why do I need a visualization tool at all? I can easily produce pie-charts, scatter plots, line charts, and histograms with Excel. Why should I be bothered about any visualization tool? Well, because I want my charts or visualizations to be simpler to produce, easier to understand and rich in the functionality. A visualization tool is the best choice especially when the data is very large or abstract. Thanks to the internet revolution, today, we have scores of visualization products for search, music, networks, online communities that let me do anything I could think of.

Essentially Many Eyes is a mash up machine for visualizing data!

The aim of Many Eyes is to explore different visual representations of large amounts of data and share it with others to help them collectively make better sense of the information.

Many Eyes is a remarkable example of generic data visualization techniques adapted to heterogeneous data sources.

Features:

• More than 1,00,000 data visualization types and 2,70,000 data sets
• Available data-sets can be downloaded and used as data sources for mash-up applications
• Allows people to explore various visual representations of large amounts of data as well as share it with others
• Supports collaborative analysis
• Offers community based data visualization
• Collaborative platform for sharing knowledge
• Easy to use, interactive, time saving

Visualizations:

Pros and Cons:

Business Value:

• This application is well suited for business users to visualize complex data, one can easily create complex visualizations in a matter of a few minutes
• A wide variety of visualizations available - network diagrams, tree maps, word clouds, geographical maps apart from the usual scatter plots, histograms and others
• What's more, one can see others' visualizations and give and take suggestions
• Helps make smarter and more accurate decisions
• It is a simpler way to make your audience understand your data, the way you want them to
• Combination of chart types is also possible. For instance, I have shared the example of a bubble chart, where each bubble is a pie chart in itself.

Now, let me get into the work. Say, I have a data set (an interesting one in that!) - The details of candidates contesting in BrihanMumbai Muncipal Corporation elections of 2012. I have the parties to which they belong, their education, assets (well, I believe we should check this out!) and other details. Here is the link for the data

http://myneta.info/bmc2012/index.php?action=dwnExcelShowAllCandidates&sort=default

Now, here is a screenshot produced using Many Eyes. The screenshot shows the party-wise candidates that have cases filed against them, and for each party, again it gives the break-up of education from 10th to doctorate. As we can see, it is a bubble chart of pie-charts. Now, that is something that is not possible in excel.

Here is the tutorial for Many Eyes!