Working with web-based visualization

A data journalist and information designer David McCandless stated in his TED talk:

"By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful."

The World Wide Web (WWW) is an information space, which publishes and displays information via the Internet. The accessibility of information through online information services and the WWW is increasing day by day. A vast amount of information is available on websites, which can be accessed through the Internet. But the user may find the information difficult to read, and hence spends a lot of time on the web. Therefore, on websites, the information should be user friendly and reading through it should not take too much time.

Most people prefer pictures over text, so the use of graphical representation of information is increasing daily, leading us to an understanding of how information is structured. We can create and post graphs for the visualization of information in a highly interactive manner all over the web.

To understand the concept well, let's look at the following screenshot that was created and posted interactively on a website:

In this chapter, we will discuss and use D3, the web-based visualization tool.

What is visualization?

Visualization is a perfect technique for creating diagrams, images, or animations to understand and communicate a message for specific purposes. Literally, visualization is a process of mapping information to visuals. We can communicate both abstract and concrete ideas using visualization through effective visual imagery.

As the volume and complexity of data produced in the arts, engineering, science, education, medicine, and interactive multimedia are growing, so too has the application of visualization in order to understand the content of the data. Presently, the field of computer graphics is found to be important in visualization application. Just as the invention of computer graphics was an important development in visualization, similarly, the development of animation has also helped advance visualization in a greater manner.

Good visualizations present a visual interpretation of the data and also improve decision making. For exploratory analysis, analytics, and for presentation of results, we can apply data visualization techniques extensively. Thus, data visualization is exploding in popularity in various fields. We will discuss web-based visualization with examples in this chapter in a comprehensive manner.