Visualization-2

Data about public sector spending is often hard to understand and compare. Statistics about government is often presented in tables. In this hack I have used open data from Eurostat (the EU statistics agency) about government expenditure for a set of countries and rendered sets of boxes in a Minecraft world. This makes it possible to explore the data by walking (flying) around the world. Boxes for expenditure data is ordered as General public services, Defence, Public order and safety, Economic affairs, Environment protection, Housing and community amenities, Health, Recreation culture and religion, Education, Social protection. ...

With the increasing availability of big/open data more people discover a need to make it understandable. One way of understanding data is by looking at it. As I have received a lot of questions lately here is a roundup of tools you can use to create visualizations of data. I have divided the tools into three groups: Libraries for using in your own web project. Client side applications that generate a standalone visualization. Hosted applications to which you upload your data and create visualizations in the cloud. 1. Visualization libraries for using in your own web project A general recommendation is to stick with libraries that work on as many client platforms as possible. This means staying away from libraries that require Flash and Silverlight. The following libraries use javascript and SVG with various fallbacks and should work well on modern phones and tablets. ...

A small visualization hack for the Eurostat Hackday on december 16.