EEA Daviz

Introduction

EEA Daviz is a web tool developed by the European Environment Agency which helps creating interactive data visualizations easily through the web browser, no extra tools are necessary. It is free and open source.

You can generate attractive and interactive charts and combine them in a dashboard with facets/filters which updates the charts simultaneously. Data can be uploaded as CSV/TSV or you can specify SPARQL to query online Linked open data servers (aka sparql endpoints).

Daviz is the first Semantic web data visualisation tool for Plone CMS, entirely web-based!

At the moment Simile Exhibit and Google Charts visualizations are supported. The architecture allows to extend Daviz with more visualisation libraries (visualisations plugins).

Contents

• Introduction
• Main features
• Live demos
• Architecture overview
• Installation
  • zc.buildout
    • Google Maps API Key
      • Plone
      • Zope
• Dependencies
• Source code
• Copyright and license
• More documentation
• Links
• Funding and project management

Main features

1. No desktop tools needed to make visualizations. all web based.
2. Data input: easy copy and paste of data table from any webpage or excel sheet
3. Data input from URL (CSV/TSV/JSON)
4. Data input: drag-and-drop your data from CSV/TSV files, and we do the rest
5. Data input advanced: retrieve data from any SPARQL endpoint on the fly
6. Intuitive visualization editor to create interactive charts.
7. Large amount of visualizations available: Area, Bar, Bubble, Candlestick, Column, Combo Chart, Gauge, Geo Intensity Maps, Line, Pie, Radar, Scatter, Stepped Area, Table, Tree Map, Motion Charts, Faceted search table, Faceted tiles, Faceted timeline, Faceted map and more...
8. Dashboard. Group charts into one or more dashboards.
9. Share any chart. Embeddable visualization in any webpage.
10. Customizable chart options and colors
11. Data table manipulation via drag and drop, preparing table for chart
12. Pivot table (Transpose), transform row values into columns
13. Modular framework for extending it with more visualizations
14. Branding: add your own logo to each chart + QR code
15. And much more...

It is simple to use, needs no desktop application, everything is done through the web by uploading an "excel file", CSV, TSV. You can also query the "web of data" via public available sparql endpoints.

You can easily make visualizations like:

1. Simile Exhibit
2. Google Charts

See also initial project wiki page for the reasoning behind this project.

Live demos

• Daviz showroom
• Google charts demos
• MIT Simile Exhibit demos

Architecture overview

At the moment Simile Exhibit and Google Charts visualizations are supported. The architecture allows to extend Daviz with more visualisation libraries (visualisations plugins).

Installation

zc.buildout

If you are using zc.buildout and the plone.recipe.zope2instance recipe to manage your project, you can do this:

• Update your buildout.cfg file:

  • Add eea.daviz to the list of eggs to install

  [instance]
  ...
  eggs =
    ...
    eea.daviz
  

• Re-run buildout, e.g. with:

  $ ./bin/buildout
  

Google Maps API Key

Plone

Within ZMI -> Plone Site -> portal_properties add a plone property sheet called geographical_properties and inside it add a new string property called google_key.

Zope

Within ZMI -> Top Folder -> manage_propertiesForm add a string property called google_key

In this property you have to paste the Google maps API KEY, follow instruction https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/introduction#Obtaining_Key

The Google account you use to generate the key has to be owner of the site, this is done by verification via Google webmaster tools.

Dependencies

EEA Daviz has the following dependencies:

• Plone 4.x
• eea.app.visualization
• eea.sparql
• eea.forms
• eea.googlecharts
• eea.exhibit
• collective.js.jqueryui < 1.9 (Plone 4.0, 4.1, 4.2)
• collective.js.jqueryui > 1.9 (Plone 4.3+)

The following package are optional. Still they can improve the user experience with this tool:

• eea.relations
• eea.cache (Check eea.cache documentation for more about memcache configuration)
• eea.depiction

[instance]
...
eggs =
  ...
  eea.daviz [full]

zcml =
  ...
  eea.daviz-overrides
  eea.daviz-full

Source code

Latest source code (Plone 4 compatible):

• Plone Collective on Github
• EEA on Github

Plone 2 and 3 compatible (Simile Exhibit visualisations only):

https://github.com/collective/eea.daviz/tree/plone25

Copyright and license

The Initial Owner of the Original Code is European Environment Agency (EEA). All Rights Reserved.

The EEA Daviz (the Original Code) is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

More details under eea.daviz/docs/License.txt

More documentation

• Daviz technical documentation on github
• Daviz plone product summary
• Data input examples
• How to prepare your data

Links

1. Simile Wiki - Exhibit 2.0: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit
2. Simile widgets: http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit
3. EEA Daviz how-to: https://svn.eionet.europa.eu/projects/Zope/wiki/HowToDaviz
4. EEA Daviz backlog wiki: https://svn.eionet.europa.eu/projects/Zope/wiki/DaViz
5. Google charts: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Funding and project management

EEA - European Environment Agency (EU)