Wednesday, April 06, 2005

prefuse: an interactive visualization toolkit

I saw a paper about this today, and wow, did it look cool. It's an open source toolkit for data visualizations written by Jeffrey Heer, with supporting publications co-authored by Stu Card and James Landay. The CHI paper today claimed it takes small numbers of lines of code to produce well-known network-style plots in the HCI literature. The toolkit sounds like it offers an API to a bunch of UI drawing functions, basically, with a kind of ad hoc programming language on top of it. They also claim a weakness with data handling (for i/o), but coincidentally I work with company that has that down pretty well plus having a pretty cool language of its own. I can't wait to see if I can get Matlab to talk to Prefuse functions.

Check it out: prefuse: an interactive visualization toolkit radial network picture

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