Nothing new under the Sun
Or should I say IBM?
It turns out IBM Alphaworks already has a data visualization project called Many Eyes that can render network diagrams as I described in my earlier post. The demos look impressive.
Their UI for adding data requires you to upload from a separate source, which makes the social aspect of my idea more difficult to implement. Perhaps Many Eyes can be used as the visualization front-end for a site that collects the data. Any data uploaded to Many Eyes becomes publicly visible, but that’s not an issue since the original site would have similar rules.
The network visualization from Many Eyes is more limited than what I would want to see in a full featured tool, though. It could be very useful to be able to see the types of relationships (using different colors for edges, etc.). They also point out that since the rendering is done in the browser, it may not be well suited for large data sets or “for networks in which a lot of nodes have a large number of neighbors”.
Originally spotted on Boing Boing.