There is a lot of data floating around out there. Quite a bit of it is unused or underused. Oh sure, machines can parse it, can sort it, can arrange it, but the quantities and relationships that comprise the data usually remain hidden from us humans until it is rendered into some visual form.

Enter THE MICROSOFT EXCEL SPREADSHEET!

(kidding…)

All joking aside, there really is some inspiring work being done to make data sets(many of them dynamic) into these very visually interesting renderings. I just came across a great source for some of these here: www.infosthetics.com. Pretty nice stuff.

Now, a lot of this is kind of on the academic side and doesn’t, initially, have a place in ol’ Regularsville. But what is great is that these processes often times make their way into the hands of good UI and graphic designers who really wrangle them in a certain way to make everything a little more palatable to a broader audience.

One of the tools with the potential to allow for the integration and use of these processes is Adobe Flex. I was just browsing at flex.org/showcase/ and there is some really nice looking stuff on there. All kinds of great looking apps with really smooth UIs that cleanly and efficiently display information in a way that gives data meaning. Huge GIS and NOAA data sets, traffic monitoring information, world statistics, and even your ancestral family tree can be encapsulated and rendered within the Flex framework, providing for an unprecedented level of interactivity and usability.