UMBC ebiquity » data http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger EBB is the ebiquity research group\\\'s blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive computing, ad hoc networking, multiagent systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the semantic web. As the tides of technology ebb and flow, we hope the good ideas wash up on our beach and the bad ones drift back out to sea. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:50:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 How to choose the right chart for your data http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/01/25/how-to-choose-the-right-chart-for-your-data/ http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/01/25/how-to-choose-the-right-chart-for-your-data/#comments Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:01:47 +0000 Tim Finin http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=1740 There are lots of good systems, including excel and other spreadsheet tools, that can visualize your data in various kinds of graphs. it can sometimes by a little daunting, however, to figure out which kind of chart to use. The version of excel running on my laptop, for example, asks me to choose from more than 70 kinds of charts. Of course, many of the variations are obviously stylistic — 2D vs 3D bar charts — but there are still a lot of options.

A link to a great data visualization cheat sheet on How to choose a chart is doing well on Hacker News today. The graphic was created by Andrew Abela and posted on his blog in Choosing a good chart over three years ago.

“Here’s something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny’s classic work Saying It With Charts (p. 27 in the 4th. ed)”


How to choose the right chart for your data

Abela developed this aid as part of his Extreme Presentation method for “designing presentations that drive action”. Viewing his Extreme Presentation blog you can find versions of this chart aide that have been translated into other languages

]]> http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/01/25/how-to-choose-the-right-chart-for-your-data/feed/ 0 Models? We don’t need no stinking models! http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/26/models-we-dont-need-no-stinking-models/ http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/26/models-we-dont-need-no-stinking-models/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:23:16 +0000 Tim Finin http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=1539 Wired has an interesting article, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, that discusses the data driven revolution that computers and the Web have unleashed. Science used to rely on developing models to explain and organize the world and make predictions. Now much of that can be done by correlating large amounts of data. It applies equally well to other disciplines (e.g., Linguistics) as well as businesses (think Google).

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

Update: And then there is this counterpoint: Why the cloud cannot obscure the scientific method .

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