Good tool to visualize data?
apu: I've been building up a javascript library to do this, as visualizizing results/data takes up more than half my research time.Unfortunately, this library is nowhere close to ready to be released, but I can describe roughly the architecture, in case it's useful to you.I take all my data and write a python script which will dump it to a .JSON file. This includes the raw data/results, names of different fields, groups of fields to toggle on/off together, and what kinds of visualizations I want to use with a given set of data (view as numbers, as bar graph, as line graph, as linear time-series data, as color-coded images, etc.)Then I have a standard html + javascript file in which I simply load in this JSON file. Because I've prespecified the format of the JSON file (I.e., what fields it has and how the data is stored), I only need to customize a few functions to display results. Things like filtering data, searching and sorting I get "for free", since they're in the library.The main advantages:- Interactive browsing of data in various formats, all in the web browser, with no plugins etc. required.- Can be viewed locally or across the network- No need for a server to be running- Processing done on each local computer, as opposed to on some server- HTML 5 is now good enough (just barely) to offer all the kinds of interaction I require- Most of the code is in my standard library for visualizations, and so the time to create a new visualization for a new set of data is quite small.Drawbacks:- HTML 5 is still slow- Can't do very advanced stuff yet, without writing a lot of custom code. On the otherhand, using jQuery + jQuery UI, it's very easy to make things draggable, for example, to compare various things side-by-side or even on top of each other (with transparancy)- No server, so can't "save" complicated settings or parameters (although cookies help).Anyway, in case you end up building something of your own, hopefully some of these ideas might help.