itpedition

Here are great four questions Clay is expecting us to answer every week. And here are my very first answers about what’s going on:

• What did you do last week?
  • I implemented that tagging function for visualizations, so any visualization uploaded can be tagged (not sure about datasets yet). Using these tags in the database, I created the new browsing page, which a user is able to search the visualizations through tags. I am going to replace the browse url soon, but till then, the url is www.openvisuals.org/browse/index2.php, otherwise it is www.openvisuals.org/browse
  • I also implemented some security measures, because I had a user who found out the way the delete all the visualizations and datasets within the website (and took the related action, of course). This had been an interesting issue because it disproved one of my assumptions; I was thinking that till a website starts getting an amount of users, the developers don’t necessarily need to spend time on dealing the security of the website and database (preventing users to access some functions). I was thinking it could be a secondary priority.
  • Actually, after I saw some user was deleting all the assets from the website, before implementing the security stuff, I implemented logging. I wanted to observe how he was behaving. I was able to log his deletion in the morning of March 1st. Then I took that portion of the logging table, and posted in openvisuals as a dataset. Maybe I can visualize it one day..
• What do you intend to do next week?
  • I am going to attend the Nature of Class, thought by Daniel Shiffman, on Wednesday, and I will present OpenVisuals to the students of that class. They are working on quite interesting processing applications, any of which can be a visualization candidate. I will invite them to use OpenVisuals to upload their applications, share it with their friends through the website. OpenVisuals API is not ready yet, so I am not going to ask them to play with it, unless I can achieve to post a stable version of the API.
  • I am going to work on API, and going to convert couple of my processing applications to visualizations using API, and upload them to the website.
  • I will think about not storing the datasets issue.
  • I will try to put the reference page up, explaining the functions of API.
• Any recent concerns and unexpected obstacles
  • one of my concerns is the datasets. Currently storing the datasets within the website brings many issues:
    • Uploading datasets requires a good troubleshooting feature, because csv files might not be properly setup, field types (text, date, integer, etc.) is a messy thing to deal with, and some couple of more technical issues.
    • It makes OpenVisuals a rival with Swivel, Many Eyes. One of my principles reminds me that ‘every competition brings opportunity for collaboration’. I started thinking on making OpenVisuals just a visualization counterpart of Swivel and Many Eyes, which the datasets from these websites can be integrated into OpenVisuals and be used with the visualizations within. So that those websites deal with the datasets part, OpenVisuals deal with the visualization part.
• Any recent insights and surprises
  • I have implemented Google Analytics and I am excited to observe user behavior through the website.
  • I started to question the dataset thing on another aspect. When I look at the visualizations around, their source are not necessarily data tables. Take the visualization of Lance Armstrong’s last tour, its source is hard to have on an excel table. There are many examples like that. Will OpenVisuals include such visualizations, and if so, how some other person can use his own source (not dataset in this case)?
  • I had one non-ITP, non-New Yorker user registered already. It is nice to have an interested person, although nothing in the website is in shape. I searched him on google, and he come out to be a visualization artist. This makes me smile :)
  • I had an attacker. This also makes me smile. His attack was quite a nice user feedback indeed.
  • In a google search of “open source visualization”, OpenVisuals shows up in the second page. This is quite nice too, considering the very limited number of hits (hence its popularity) it is currently taking.