New Tools for Exploring Data in GeoCommons!

As the number of data sets on GeoCommons continues to grow we are constantly looking for new ways to allow users to explore the data.  A variety of recent projects have pushed us develop new tools for interacting with emerging multidimensional data streams.  Today we are pushing out a new release that gives you three new tools for diving into the data in GeoCommons:

Charts – as much as we love map visualizations often times it is useful to view your data non-geographically.  To get a new perspective on data in GeoCommons you can now, in a few clicks, create pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, area graphs and scatter plots.

Data grids - view and edit the raw tabular data while you are in the map view.

Multidimensional time slider - we’ve revamped out time slider to give you a new range of options for exploring the temporal dimensions of your data.  The new time slider is two tiered so you can zoom into any time slice for more details.  You also have the choice to aggregate and disaggregate your data at different temporal scales (seconds, minutes, hours, days, months or years).  Last but not least you can choose between animating your data cumulatively or as a range.

We hope these new tools will let you plum the depths of your data for new discovery.  As we see a larger variety of data coming on line the need to diversify the techniques by which you can explore new content will continue to be critical.  The most exciting part – this is just the tip of the iceberg of new capabilities we’ve built into the GeoIQ platform.  Stay tuned for additional releases as well as new and improved back-end API support to repurpose any of it for your own projects.