Information Visualization: Gapminder.org
Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.
Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.
The initial activity was to continue development of the Trendalyzer software. This software unveils the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics. The current beta version of Trendalyzer is available since March 2006 as Gapminder World, a web-service displaying a few time series of development statistics for all countries www.gapminder.org/world . In March 2006 Google acquired Trendalyzer from Gapminder Foundation and the team of developers that worked for Gapminder has joined Google in California since April 2007.
Since the Trendalyzer development was taken over by Google the Gapminder Foundation maintain the same aim and uses Trendalyzer and its resources to produce videos and web service showing major global development trends with animated statistics. Such a 3 to10 minute video is called a GapCast and they are published as free web casts with the aim of promoting a fact based world view. A GapCast converts statistical time series into moving graphics in ways that allows evidence based trends to be told as simple story lines. The time series used will be made freely available in the web service called Gapminder World that enable end users to further explore the underlying statistics in Trendalyzer graphics.
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[...] flair.Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data [...]