Alexey Smirnov's blog

Internet offers lots of information, above any reasonable amount for a normal human being. Thus, consuming information is not that easy. Researchers found out that there are two types of people – those who prefer web pages with few highlights and those who get excited when they see lots of numbers, possibly visualized.

In other words, lack of detail is not always what people are looking for. Personally, I get excited when I see lots of detailed information. Then I bookmark such a web page with the idea that I will visit it again to read it carefully but that happens rarely. I will revisit a web page if it is really important. This is why I like semantic web – it has lots of inter-linked structured information. On my web site I have lots of information represented as charts. Most of it is hidden in a protected zone, for example financial information.

In year 2005 I read an article in IEEE Spectrum. It described the idea of Gordon Bell who worked on MyLifeBits project. The idea is to record all possible information, everything that happens to you throughout the day using a camera. I am trying to implement this idea without a camera, though.The example above shows the number of visits to swimming pool per month.

I need a tool to visualize vast amounts of information. I want to try out different representations – bars, lines, circles, etc. and I need this charts on the web. There are lots of good drawing programs but they are not web-ready.

Google charts bridge the gap between information visualization and web. All the data and metadata are encoded in the URL. Of course, building such URLs manually is not easy. Thus I needed a tool to build charts quickly with different parameters.

I have searched Internet but what I found were tools that asked lots of questions. Instead, give me a chart that is almost ready, I will plug in my data and get the result. In other words, we need an
example-driven tool.

Here is Google Charts Builder. A sample chart is displayed as soon as the page is opened. I tried to make it as nice as possible. Not any type of the chart is supported yet, I will add them as necessary.

I have used this tool to build lots of charts and it allowed me to experiment with scale, chart type, labels, colors, etc.

There are tools for other Google APIs, for example Google Maps builder.