Two free (and unique) data visualization tools - Heatmaps and Graphviz

Any end user will tell you that having a finely tuned and designed warehouse of data is all good and fine, but making sense of it all is a challenge in itself, and people are always interested in new and novel ways of seeing large volumes of data in context. These are two rarely used tools that are good to add to your front-end toolbox, especially for dashboard and data mining hackers:

Heatmap Builder is a free tool from Stanford Labs to build a Heatmap (see pic) from a data set. Heatmaps can look a bit confusing at first, but where you get alot of value is in comparing maps, either from different data sets or different time periods, as it allows you to instantly spot differences. Spits out a jpg, gif, png, at any size you choose.


GraphViz is a very cool mapping and relationship-spotting tool from ATT Labs. Some people have used this on email histories in a company to determine how groups work together and to identify the "connectors" between them. Applicable to probably much much more.

Examples:


From "Graphing Perl".

Here's a Graphviz tutorial to get a quick start.