Weave open-source data visualization

When two Boston-area organizations rolled out an interactive data visualization website last month, it represented one of the largest public uses yet for the open-source project Weave -- and more are on the way.

Three years in development so far and still in beta, Weave is designed so government agencies, non-profits and corporate users can offer the public an easy-to-use platform for examining information. Want to see the relationship between low household incomes and student reading scores in eastern Mass.? How housing and transportation costs compare with income? Or maybe how obesity rates have changed over time? Load some data to generate a table, scatter plot and map.

In addition to viewing data, mousing over various entries lets you highlight items on multiple visualizations at once: map, map legend, bar chart and scatter plot, for example. Users can also add visualization elements or change data sets, as well as right-click to look up related information on the Web.

Weave demo visualization of foreclosures in Lowell, Mass. Here is the interactive version (give it some time to load).

Data visualization tools have long been in the hands of the technically savvy, but Weave aims to help organizations democratize them, creating what project head Georges G. Grinstein calls a Wikipedia of data -- a way for anyone interested in a topic to explore and analyze information about it, instead of leaving the task solely to computer and data specialists.

"Now [you're] engaging the public in a dialog with the data," said Grinstein, director of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell's Institute for Visualization and Perception Research. "That's why Weave is open source and free" -- even though it contains some university-patented technology (the institution agreed to allow it in the software).

Weave is "ridiculously powerful," said Holly St. Clair, data services director at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

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