OpenVisuals Blog

I guess, besides the techy posts, it is time to talk more about what OpenVisuals is, why it is there, who it is talking to, how it is being developed…

When we were asked to give a one sentence description of our thesis project at ITP, my response was:

OpenVisuals is an open source visualization platform, and provides dataset owners user submitted open source visualizations, which can be directly used with their datasets within the website. While they are allowed to keep their data private, they can also tweak the visualizations to better match to their datasets. Website also works as a bridge in connecting dataset owners to visualization artist, and allow them to communicate in order to work collaboratively, develop a business relationship, etc…

Since then, I am able to observe the parts that I missed mentioning, and the parts that I over-emphasized. First of all, the mission of the website got lost in the confusion of the terminologies, etc..

OpenVisuals has a mission, which had been already out there, in various parts of the web. There have been a lot of visualization piece/art being developed for various reasons; giving datasets a visual sense, better comparison, etc.. But besides, I believe the ‘visualization’ that we started mentioning in this age of technology and internet is more than just getting meaning out of a data. Visualizations also started to embed personal expressions, points of views. Their datasets changed both medium and context; they can be excel tables but also your conversation around a table (sound), videos on youtube (video), or Bush’s State of the Union talk (text). And even more interesting part is that, creating the right visualization for a data is becoming an obsession. A nice one to have.. And not only Bush is interested in seeing his use of words changing after 9/11 in a visualization, but many people started to seek better visualization for that data that they don’t own. Deforestation information and world hunger level is already out there, but visualizations started to show up to make that data more available, more attractive, more impressive, and in YouTube. Visualization itself started having the mission of delivering that data.

Considering these great visualizations and their data/info/etc.., OpenVisuals suggests to make these visualizations available for everyone, for every dataset.

OpenVisuals also suggests that, that visualization may also work great with this data.

OpenVisuals suggests, more people analyzing a data can create a better visualization for that.

OpenVisuals suggests, that person would suggest another visualization for this dataset owner.

OpenVisuals suggests, this artist would be very interested to visualize that data.

OpenVisuals is a framework for these suggestions to become realized.

OpenVisuals has two major user groups. Dataset owners and Visualization Artists. Dataset Owners are not satisfied with pie charts, and looking for better ways to visualize their data. But defining a visualization artist is a little harder. Visualization Artist is a person who created a visualization, who wants to create one, who thought of a data to be visualized better, who found that nuance while comparing, and who likes to visualize data, share that visualization, or looking for people to talk on the subject. And visualization artist, also prefers developing visualization in Java/Processing environment. Visualization artist wants to show his pieces, and get feedback on how people are using them.

This draft become too long, rest is coming in another post.