Data Sharing and Vizualization: Next Generation

The International Weekly Journal of Science has published an interesting article illustrating how social software us creating a new paradigm for sharing data. Proof in point is IBM's new Many Eyes service launched on January 23rd. The site provides an infrastructure for uploading data sets and creating visualization for the data through various visualization types available.
By making the data publicly available and providing an infrastructure to analyze it, it empowers individuals and creates a very powerful model for developing collective intelligence quickly. Fernanda Viégas of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts points out that governments, international agencies and research organizations generate huge silos of publicly available data on almost every aspect of society, but the public has never been able to explore, share and discuss these data sets easily. That is interesting, but more interestingly, I could see huge applications of this type of technology to the enterprise with potential dynamic enterprise datasets. In the enterprise context, this type of application of social software could drastically impact organizations' ability to be more data driven and to leverage data to collaborate on business decisions.

Below, some more screenshots from Many Eyes.

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