datavisualisation

This weeks lecture focused on datavisualisation. Datavisualisation is all how expressing information or data in a visual format. Doing this helps to understand what the data means and can help in finding out information that would be near impossible without the visualisation.

The best data visualisations feature a depth of information, interactivity and an attractive visual scheme. These features help with understanding and allows the viewer to easily comprehend what the data is showing. A good use of colour schemes help with this, as it allows people to grasp the data's meaning instantly. For example using red, yellow and green can help when representing levels of good, medium and bad. This colour scheme's meaning is universal, as it is known because of traffic lights and through this, people can under linked meanings associated with it.

So essentially, datavisualisation's can greatly enhance a how raw data can be represented and understood.

Multiplicity and tutorial ideas

OK so yesterday's lecture was about multiplicity and reiterated the idea of collective intelligence. So in today's tute, we explored these ideas further, and were assigned into groups and were given the task of thinking up an idea for a website that utilized collective intelligence. My group had the idea of using collective intelligence to track cars around a city in real time.

The basic idea was to give every registered car a free small G.P.S tracking device. This device then would then be able to provide the cars location in real time. All the data from all the cars would then be shown on a website with a map interface, as a white dot. This would enable people to see in real time, where the all the traffic jams, road accidents and delays are. People could then use the website to plan routes and avoid traffic congestion. This would then save on time, fuel and carbon emissions.

This service data could also be utilized by governments to plan future road works and create greater traffic conditions, which would also improve on time, fuel and carbon emissions. The data would be recorded and anybody could look back on previous records to see different traffic patterns and problems.

The problems with this idea is that it would take a massive amount of server space both to host and to process the data in real time and there would be a slight privacy concern.

This idea would be completely impossible without the use of collective intelligence, as without the collective co-operation of car driver using the G.P.S tracking device, the data would never be collected or utilized.

Anyway this is the basic idea of our tute presentation. I hope this might inspire some people. ols out

collective intelligence and the cute shiny slidey stuff

Ok cool that last lecture was quite interesting, as it talked about the new generation web verses the old generation web. The greatest point of interest is collective intelligence, or the many to many model. This is opposed to the old one to many model. Are you confused? OK I'll break it down for you. In the early years of the internet, that basic idea of sites, was to provided content for the general public. The site used the one to many model, by have only a few content publishers and content controllers to provided the info that goes onto the site. But nowadays, site creators can utilize collective intelligence for the content of their site. This means the amount of data that can be provided as site content goes up astronomically (this actually depends on the amount of visitor who use the site) and all they need to do it provide a user friendly framework (or the cute shiny slidey stuff). Great examples of collective intelligence include Wikipedia, Ebay, Youtube and Facebook. So in conclusion collective intelligence, or the many to many content model, is one of the great breakthroughs of the world wide web and it has made the internet a crucial part of peoples lives. ols out

the holidays are over

well long time no speak. The holidays are now over and it's time get back to lectures, readings and tutes. The main thing I've been thinking about when i now look at some websites, is the way the colour scheme is set out. Most of the sites all try and use soft, complementing colour schemes to aid the readers ease of viewing, but some have varying success. Some use clashing colours to emphases the main parts of websites, seen here at http://astroboyflyingabovetokyo.blogspot.com. The creator uses white as the main content backing and black as the background for everything else. This is a great colour scheme, as it clearly defines what the viewer is seeing. It is also truly effective when the colourful content of the blog posts is taken into account. Because the blog focuses on colourful fashion designs, having anything else then the black and white scheme could be a potential clash for whatever colorful design is posted, at any given time. S this is an example of a website colour scheme done well.
ols out.