Fresh & New(er)

discussion of issues around digital media and museums by Seb Chan

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Many Eyes – another online data visualisation tool

January 24th, 2007 by Seb Chan

Many Eyes is another online data visualisation tool. Created by the people behind the Baby Name Voyager and other nifty visualisation tools, Many Eyes looks pretty amazing. It uses Java rather than Flash for the visualisations.

Unlike Swivel, who modified their T&C to offer a Creative Commons model the T&C for Many Eyes, being an IBM project is overly restrictive.

Any information that You submit to IBM and the results are considered non-confidential, and IBM will be free to disclose them for any purpose. IBM will not return to You the information You submit. For quality control and other purposes, IBM may monitor your use of the Service and transmission of information through it. IBM is not responsible for any third party seeing or obtaining information or results transmitted through the Service.

Any data submitted should at least require proper attribution by IBM.

That said, take a look, the data upload is just a cut & paste which is surprisingly robust and easier than uploading a formatted file. The range of visualisation choices, their speed and interactivity is lovely.

Tags: 3 Comments

  • CD

    maybe i’m missing something, but what is “overly restrictive” about that license? i read it three times now, all i see is that you’re posting to a public website and it asks you to agree that the data can be publicly disclosed. that’s giving up way less rights than the crative commons license that says you’re giving it freely to the whole world to do what they want with!!

  • Seb Chan

    CD

    Maybe I am being overly picky about this but if, say the museum was to post some data on Many Eyes then we would want to be sure that if it was used by others that its source was credited. That is why an ATTRIBUTION license from CC is a perhaps a better fit for us and perhaps other users.

    I know this isn’t a big deal for everyone but if it is your data set that you or your organisation has spent considerable time and resources gathering, then ensuring attribution is important – and something that can be achieved with a license.

    I’m happy for the “the whole world to do what they want with it” but I’d like to ensure attribution occurs.

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