Spice Up Your Site with SIMILE Widgets

by Joe Brockmeier - Feb. 24, 2010Comments (0)

The SIMILE Widgets project has four nifty tools for Web developers who want to provide data visualization or to create exhibits from pictures, with minimal coding required.

The Timeline widget can be used to create a scrolling timeline to help visualize event or other "temporal" data. Timeline can be used for historical visualizations, such as the JFK Assassination timeline and life of Monet, or might be used by a project to visualize the development roadmap. Users interact with the timeline with their mouse scrollwheel or just by dragging the timeline. Each point on the timeline can contain further details that are displayed in a overlay pop-up.

The Exhibit widget is good for, well, exhibits. This includes everything from interactive maps to content catalogs that are searchable or filtered by various categories. Examples include a display of billionaires in history that shows a map of all of the billionaires throughout history (guess which country has produced the most so far?), and a grid comparison of the billionaires including age at peak wealth and how much they had in the kitty. You'll also find a guide to breakfast cereal characters which an be filtered by decade, brand, and countries.

Showing a timeplot is made much easier with the Timeplot widget. This handy little widget gives you the ability to map data like George W. Bush's approval ratings over a given timespan.

Want to display a series of images in a "Cover Flow" type visualization? The Runway widget can be used to generate a Flash animation that resembles the Cover Flow animation found first in Apple's iTunes. Runway comes with several themes out of the box, and the angle, reflection, colors, fonts, and much more can be specified by the developer or user if the controls are left available when Runway is deployed on a site.

The SIMILE Widgets hail from the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments project, which is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The widgets are examples of projects that "graduated" from the project into full-fledged open source projects with contributors from all over. All of the widgets are made available under the BSD license, but a credit link back to the SIMILE site is appreciated by the project if you deploy one or more of the widgets on your site. Learn more at the SIMILE Widgets site, and explore the Google Code.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. Brockmeier is also a FLOSS advocate and participates in several projects, including GNOME as the PR team lead. You can reach Zonker at jzb@zonker.net and follow him on Twitter.