I’ve been looking for such a resource for quite a bit of time. Yesterday I’ve run into the article signed by Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock and Vadim Ogievetsky from Stanford University which provides:

A survey of powerful visualization techniques, from the obvious to the obscure.

Everyone’s recommending Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. After reading it, I realized that I was expecting something else.. This article is what I was looking for.

Original title and link: A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1805128

Very nice list of visualization tools, some of them I’ve never heard of:

1. iCharts
2. Flot
3. Raphaël
4. ModestMaps
5. Leaflet
6. Timeline
7. Exhibit
8. WolframAlpha
9. Visual.ly
10. VisualizeFree
11. BetterWorldFlux
12. jQuery Visualize
13. jqPlot
14. Dipity
15. ManyEyes
16. D3.js
17. JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
18. jpGraph
19. Highcharts
20. Google Charts

There’s one I know of that’s not in this list: Tableau Software.

Original title and link: The 20 Best Tools for Data Visualization (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.creativebloq.com/design-tools/data-visualisation-712402

Pretty interesting usage of Neo4j for visualizing Bitcoin block chain:

Source code available on GitHub.

Original title and link: Neo4j-Based Bitcoin Block Chain Visualizer (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: https://github.com/thallium205/BitcoinVisualizer

Nice tool for visualizing and exploring graph databases:

Currently it supports only Neo4j, but it can be extended to other graph databases.

Original title and link: Linkurious: Visualize Graph Data Easily (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://linkurio.us/

This one is for ops, devops, noops and everyone else that loves some state-of-art real-systems behavior visualizations and investigation:

The subsecond offset heat map puts time on two axes. The x-axis shows the passage of time, with each column representing one second. The y-axis shows the time within a second, spanning from 0.0s to 1.0s (time offsets). The z-axis (color) show the count of samples or events, quantized into x- and y-axis ranges (“buckets”), with the color darkness reflecting the event count (darker == more).

Speechless

Original title and link: Visualizing Systems Behavior: Subsecond Offset Heat Maps (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/03/26/subsecond-offset-heat-maps/

Networks are usually drawn using a technique called node-link diagrams. While that works well for small graphs (the technical name for networks), it breaks down beyond a few dozen nodes. […] For a while now, people in visualization have talked about the graph without the graph, i.e., graph visualization without the hairballs. Networks are clearly important and challenging data, and it seems a bit myopic to only look at node-link visualization. Node quilts and the PivotGraph represent promising steps into a very different direction.

These are some good answers to how to scale graph visualizations.

Original title and link: Different Graph Visualization Models: Graphs Beyond the Hairball (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://eagereyes.org/techniques/graphs-hairball

Put together one of the most impressive visualization tools, Tableau Software, with one of the best solutions for big data, Hadoop, and you’ll probably get some astonishing results.

Credit Cloudera.

While Tableau Software works with structured data only, with this connector it gets access to Hive through HiveQL.

Original title and link: Visualizing Hadoop data with Tableau Software and Cloudera Connector for Tableau (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2012/02/cloudera-connector-for-tableau-has-been-released/

The good:

Christian Chabot^[1]: “Every instance of people turning raw data into something useful includes turning it into a picture”

The tech:

VizQL, the visualization query language that powers the software, was developed at Stanford University by Chris Stolte and Pat Hanrahan, a founding employee at Pixar and the chief architect of that company’s RenderMan visualization and 3D rendering software—an effort that won him two Oscars.

The bad:

Unlike many emerging data technologies, Tableau was built for structured data—whatever fits nicely into rows and columns […]

As a final note, Tableau is able to draw some of the most beautiful graphics I’ve seen. They are much nicer even than Horace Dediu’s graphics.

via: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/11/23/big-data-success-stories-tableau-software/?mod=WSJBlog

Jeff Kelly:

To reiterate, there’s still plenty of work to do on the infrastructure layer of Hadoop and other Big Data approaches. But the focus of the Big Data industry is — and should be — moving to include analytics and visualization.

Differently put data is not the end goal.

Original title and link: Big Data Focus Shifting to Analytics and Visualization (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://wikibon.org/blog/hadoop-big-data-focus-shifting-to-analytics-and-visualization/