EmDeG (Exhibit my Delicious Graffle) combines three fantastic tools into one killer web app for making sense of data - here’s how it stacks up:
- Del.icio.us brings social bookmark tagging
- Exhibit enables fast data exploration and structuring
- OmniGraffle creates beautiful charts
So why is EmDeG useful?
Let’s say you are collecting data on various map sources or perhaps open planning tools. Delicious is great for the first five or ten items, but then things start to get complicated - it’s hard to see all the items or have any kind of structure, and dynamically assessing what you have is difficult.
Enter Exhibit - a fantastic and under-used tool from the Haystack group at MIT. Filter your list by keywords, search dynamically and add grouping headers. Suddenly a long list becomes more manageable. It works well for lists of like and non-alike items - see this example of student groups - but doesn’t work so well for dynamically exploring data in the style of the all-conquering pivot table. Perhaps you want to view data by state, or source, or year. Facette does a neat job with these first two steps, but wouldn’t it be great to view your data in a graphical layout?
And for flow charts and beautiful data layouts, nothing comes close to OmniGraffle. Wish it was cheaper and had a windows or web version, but these are side comments. For making charts of complex structured data, it’s really superb. Neat as graphviz iz, izznot OmniGraffle.
So why put these tools together? EmDeG takes the best of all three, giving fast exploration of structured data, even when the structure might be distributed across many tags (think state names, platforms, programming languages). And the delicious foundation means that everything is dynamically powered by a widely used data collection platform - I put a link into your inbox, and all your org charts update automatically. Putting information into flow charts and organization diagrams leads to meaningful visualization, beyond long list syndrome. Grab tags to make them headers, or to cluster items into blobs. Of course, as a web tool, you get wiki-like collaborative editing and sharing, urls to view charts as an image, etc.
