Data & Network Visualization Tools – A Primer#
How do you see your data? In the form of tables, CSV files, text reports, graphs, charts or may be something more interactive like geo-spatial maps. IMHO, Visualization is quite important to making sense of data; if you want to really know what’s in it, I’d want to see something more than a mental image. Therefore, for knowledge discovery and data mining, having a visual interpretation is quite worthwhile. There are different visualization tools and frameworks available for different application domains for instance sports, social networks, product search, shopping, news, movies, music, lexical & text analysis, internet & search related, government, politics, geographic, demographics, business and stocks. Network Visualization is a topic of interest in computing genre’s such as human computer interaction, traffic analysis, financial algorithms etc.

I’ve been looking into network visualization tools for some assignments when Jeff pointed me out to dig labs tools; “stack” from digg, this is what I’d call a true next generation data visualization apparatus. It monitors the real time activity as the stories are being “dugg” and then add them onto a “stack”. The stack elements flash if the same story gets “dugg” again. This real-time interactive display of web activity is an excellent example of how next generation web analytics tool would evolve.  A different approach has been taken by digg labs tool swarm where news are connected together in the form of a, well, swarm. These news are shown to get connected together for brief periods of time via a network connection and the nature of connectivity is shown as legend. Visually it looks almost like cellular automata or game of life, quite interesting.

What’s in visualized data for financial markets? Smart money market maps show an exciting way of looking at market situation in a quick and effective way. Different market sectors are divided into squares and then colored according to their performance. Web 2.0 has a big market for visualization tools. How the blogs are linked together? Who is looking at whose profile? How are the people connected together and how do tags identify them? These are all the new areas of interest for advertisers, data analysts and social network analyzers.

Outfoxed (now lijit) has several good Visualization demos and their Basic architecture diagram is very much like AJAX infrastructure. ThinkMap’s Visual Thesaurus is a good example of semantic networks. Tracking the threat provides a network navigator to show “visual link analysis and discovery of entities and relationships in the database”. An effective way of looking at different entities connected together based on open source data. Jeff's professor at UCLA is working on visualization techniques of n-dimensional spaces in three dimensions so I'll add more to it as it comes.
 

University of Maryland has compiled a very good list of visualization tools for different application domains here.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/viz4all_a.html

 
References and Further Reading


Digg the story




4/12/2007 9:47:07 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) #    Comments [1]  |  Trackback

 

And the Most Obfuscated Message Award Goes To ...#

To the Visual Studio.NET 2003 integration with Perforce - The Catastrophic Failure








4/11/2007 8:01:12 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) #    Comments [0]  |  Trackback

 

Note to Self – Using Log4Net in five Simple Steps.#

I don’t know about you folks but my memory is quite lousy. At the ripe age of 26, it’s not as good as its use to be and hence I usually end up looking things up like when trying to use Log4NET. My favorite destination is either the Apache website or Nauman’s article on Log4NET. So here is a simple five step process of adding logging to an application. For times when MS logging app block seems like overkill and console writing to a text file is not an option, Log4NET is the way to go.

So without further ado

Step 1. Add the following at the top of the application config file. This tells the config engine that there is a Log4NET section

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>

  <configSections>
    <
section name="log4net" type="System.Configuration.IgnoreSectionHandler"/>
 
</
configSections>

 
Step 2. Add the following before/after appsettings.

<log4net>

    <appender name="MyApplicationLogFileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">
     
<
param name="File" value="log\\MyLogFile"/>
     
<
param name="DatePattern" value=".yyyy-MM-dd-tt&quot;.log&quot;"/>
     
<
param name="AppendToFile" value="true"/>
     
<
param name="RollingStyle" value="Date"/>
     
<
param name="StaticLogFileName" value="false"/>
     
<
layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
       
<
param name="ConversionPattern" value="%r %d [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n"/>
     
</
layout>
    </
appender>
    <
root>
      <
level value="DEBUG"/>
     
<
appender-ref ref="MyApplicationLogFileAppender"/>
   
</
root>
  </
log4net>

 

Step 3. Add the following in the AssemblyInfo.cs

[assembly: log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator(Watch = true)]

 Step 4. Add the following at the top of your class

public static ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);

Step 5. Add the following line in the code where you want logging to be done.

log.Info("Program Started " + DateTime.Now.ToString ());

This will log the info in the MyLogFile in the log folder.

The above steps provide a cookie cutter recipe for jump start using Log4NET. For further information about what the above config sections actually mean, please see the following reference articles below.

References

Apache log4net: Home

ONDotnet.com -- Using log4net

 





4/5/2007 11:08:12 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) #    Comments [2]  |  Trackback

 

Thoughts on the Science of Computing - Jeff Bergman Starts Blogging#

Jeff Bergman, a friend and co-worker started his blog titled “Thoughts on the science of Computing”. He is currently pursuing his Masters from UCLA in Computer Science and has some great thoughts on topics like algorithms, search, data mining and computational heuristics.

His blog can be found at

http://jeffbergman.com/cs/blogs/csjeff/default.aspx

and the RSS can be added from here.
http://jeffbergman.com/cs/blogs/csjeff/rss.aspx

 

 

 





4/5/2007 5:12:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) #    Comments [1]  |  Trackback

 

Google TiSP - Sweeet!#
Google's "Dark porcelain" project

http://www.google.com/tisp/

Only if it was true :)






4/2/2007 12:00:01 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) #    Comments [0]  |  Trackback

 

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