Solved – Does anyone know any good open source software for visualizing data from database

data visualizationinteractive-visualizationsoftware

Recently I came across Tableau and tried to visualize the data from database and csv file. The user iterface enables the user to visualize time and spatial data and create plots in an instant. Such tool is really useful as it enables to observe the data graphically without writing the code.

As there are many data sources from which I have to retrieve and visualize the data it would be very useful to have a tool which enabled to generate charts by simply dragging columns on axes and additionally modify the visualization with dragging the column names as well.

Does anyone know any free or open source software of that kind?

Best Answer

I've never tried it, but there's an open source desktop / browser-based visualisation suite called WEAVE (short for Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment). Like Tableau, it's intended to let you explore data through an interactive click-based interface. Unlike Tableau, it's open source: you can download the source code and install your own version on your own machine which can be as private or as public as you want it to be. Don't expect anything nearly as slick and user-friendly as Tableau, but it looks like an interesting, powerful project for someone prepared to put the time in to learning to use it.

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Or, you can look into rolling your own. There are some really good open source javacript tools for supporting programming data visualisation in a browser. If you don't mind coding some Javascript and some kind of server-side layer to serve up the data, give these a try:

  • Miso Dataset for getting, processing, managing and cleaning the data on the client side in Javascript (includes a CSV parser)
  • D3 for interactive visualisations in SVG (works in every browser except IE8 and earlier and old (v1,v2) Android phones).
  • gRaphael for interactive cross-browser standard charts

  • Raphael if you need SVG output to work in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8.

If you're interested in the web programming option, here's a slightly more detailed write-up I wrote on Raphael and D3 for stackoverflow.

There are also some free (not open source) online datavis suites worth mentioning (probably not suitable for direct DB connection but worth a look):

  • Raw by Density Design - blog introduction - (hit "Choose a data sample" to try it out) - mostly copy and paste based, not sure if it has an API that can connect to a database but good for trying things out quickly.
  • Tableau Public - a free-to-use online version of Tableau. The catch is, the data you enter into it and any visualisations you create must be publicly available.

And something completely different: if you have a quality server lying around and you happen to want to make awesome google-maps style tile-based 'slippy' maps using open source tech (probably not what you're looking for - but it's possible!), check out MapBox TileMill. Have a look through the gallery of examples on their home page - some of them are truly stunning. See also related project Modest Maps, an open source Javascript library for interacting with maps developed by Stamen Design (a really highly rated agency specialising in interactive maps). It's considered to be an improvement on the more established OpenLayers. All open source.

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WEAVE is the best GUI-based open-source tool I know of for personal visual analysis.

The other tools listed are top of the range tools for online publishing of visualisations (for example, D3 is used by and developed by the award-winning NY Times graphics team), and are more often used for visualisation in the context of public-facing communications than exploratory analysis, but they can be used for analysis too.

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