More on Mashups: Linear Charts

In my previous postings, I wrote about TopBraid's new Calendar mashup feature as well as our RDFa editor. Version 1.5 introduces yet another feature called the Linear Chart View. This view allows users to display numeric values along a linear chart with X and/or Y axes. If you have an ontology about real estate properties, and want to get a chart to compare the prices of all relevant properties, then you can display them along the X axis:


Alternatively, you can use the Y Axis:



To make things more interesting (also in the sense of mashing up data from multiple sources), select the price along the X axis and the number of bedrooms along the Y axis:



You can use the mouse to drag the chart in all directions or to change the zooming level. The chart is also clickable and has tool tip texts to display details. It is easy to imagine that we could have similar viewers for other types of diagrams such as pie charts.

TopBraid is increasingly becoming an information integration hub that puts a lot of power into the hands of ontology designers and users. For example, you could create ontologies that serve as a view on a relational database or lift Excel spreadsheets into the Semantic Web. Then combine these data sources with other ontologies and finally display them on chart. In the near future you will also be able to publish the very same models and views on the Web so that end users can analyze them with a thin Ajax-based client. There is quite a bit happening with TopBraid these days. I wonder where this journey is taking us...