The Tcl manual page - a cloudy view
Torsten Berg
this is fun. I was recently looking for some Tcl code to produce nice-
looking "abundance clouds" (often tag clouds) on the text widget or
the canvas widget. There are some really nice applications out there.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to produce views like these using Tcl
(and not Java like in this example):
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1379498/The_Tcl_language
This is the Tcl manual page as a cloud and it actually tells you, what
the important keywords are ...
Torsten
Donal K. Fellows
You won't be able to lay them out quite like that on the text widget.
That's the canvas's job. (Also, it has "Backslash" and "backslash" as
separate terms...) But if you use the tricks that are used for doing
this sort of thing on normal webpages (lots of social tagging sites do
this) with just varying the font size (do you need us to write you
code to do that?!) then you'll be able to do a reasonable job in
hardly anything very much.
I've never done this sort of thing though. Never really seen the
point. (I guess I don't think of documents and tagging in the same way
as others...)
Donal.
Torsten Berg
> That's the canvas's job. (Also, it has "Backslash" and "backslash" as
> separate terms...)
Yes, it also has "character" and "characters", so there is srill room
for improvement.
> But if you use the tricks that are used for doing
> this sort of thing on normal webpages (lots of social tagging sites do
> this) with just varying the font size (do you need us to write you
> code to do that?!) then you'll be able to do a reasonable job in
> hardly anything very much.
Oh, no, I don't need to have code written for me. I can do it myself,
when I get the time. There are lots of algorithms out there to layout
data visually in a pleasing way and as you said, tag clouds are the
most prominent examples.
> I've never done this sort of thing though. Never really seen the
> point. (I guess I don't think of documents and tagging in the same way
> as others...)
Well, the point is not so much to get simple documents like the Tcl
man page to show up in a different way, but more to visualize mass
data in a way to grasp the essence. I come the biology field and know
all this boring diagram business where noone but the author is able to
see the point. I want to visualize e.g. benthic communities, their
structure and abundance relations so also people not being experts can
understand the points I make. Another example is
This is the way to make statstics understanable.
Torsten
Larry W. Virden
>
> This is the way to make statstics understanable.
Another interesting use I see regularly is at my local public library
< http://www.columbuslibrary.org/ >. Their online search now provides
a term cloud as part of the results . So, you type in a keyword,
author, title, etc. and the software generates, along with the first
page of hits, a cloud of "related terms". When you click on a term, a
new search is performed on that term. It allows you to browse
information about books, dvds, music cds, etc. in an interactive
method.
Torsten Berg
Oh, yes, this is nice. This leads you to book or publications you
would not find otherwise.
Here is another example of what I use this for: a typical benthic
community ranked after the abundance of the genera that live there:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1379841/Benthos
Torsten
Donal K. Fellows
> Well, the point is not so much to get simple documents like the Tcl
> man page to show up in a different way, but more to visualize mass
> data in a way to grasp the essence.
Sure. It's just that even with complex data, these tag cloud things
don't really do it for me. As I noted, it's probably to do with how
*I* think.
Donal.
Trend
I have the pleasure to brief on our Data Visualization software "Trend
Compass".
TC is a new concept in viewing statistics and trends in an animated
way by displaying 5 axis (X, Y, Time, Bubble size & Bubble color)
instead of just the traditional X and Y axis. It could be used in
analysis, research, presentation etc. In the banking sector, we have
sold it to Deutsche Bank New York.
Latest financial links on the Central Bank of Egypt:
http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/balance-sheet
http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/banks-deposits-by-maturity/
http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/egyptian-banks/
http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/currency-by-denomination/
This is another bank link to compare Deposits, Withdrawals and numbers
of Customers for different branches over time ( all in 1 Chart) :
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/bank-trx/
Misc Examples :
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/stockmarket1/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/tax/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/football/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/swinefludaily/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/flu/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/babyboomers/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/bank-trx/
http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/advertising/
This is a project we did with Princeton University on US
unemployment :
http://www.epicsyst.com/main3.swf
A 3 minutes video presentation of above by Professor Alan Krueger
Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton
University using Trend Compass :
http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass/princeton.aspx?home=1
I hope you could evaluate it and give me your comments. So many ideas
are there.
You can download a trial version. It has a feature to export
EXE,PPS,HTML and AVI files. The most impressive is the AVI since you
can record Audio/Video for the charts you create.
http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass/FreeVersion/TrendCompassv1.2_DotNet.zip
All the best.
Ossama Hamed