Visually Representing Internet Data?

d0om asks: "I'm curious if there is a program that allows one to view a graphical, three-dimensional representation of data, much like in the Matrix concept in the book Neuromancer where you have a grid of different blocks of data, all presented visually. I'm curious if anyone can recommend anything of this sort to me."

Visualization

[SEWilco]

Go to Freshmeat.Net [freshmeat.net], SAL [kachinatech.com] or your other favorite software directories (or a web search engine) and search for "visualization" or "scientific visualization". Also consider Computer Aided Design tools [kachinatech.com] There are assorted tools that you can feed all kinds of data to.

I've taken SNMP data from radio network nodes, dropped it into Gnuplot, and placed on a web page a rotating GIF of a 3-D contour plot showing what the error rates are througout a building. There also are tools which can be interfaced to external data. I've used network configuration data to produce charts (although TkIned has tools to do this already).

Maybe "The Brain"?

[tooth]

I not sure about 3D representations of data, but I'd love to see a (simple) 2D representation of web sites, maybe a simple image map going about 3-5 links down.

Anyway, check out the brain, it might be close to what you're talking about (note: it's not open source/free software)

all-in-one

[hownice]

Check Rika Furuhata's page (in english ;) http://www.imv.is.ocha.ac.jp:8080/~rika2/iv/

Lots; easy to find

[gbnewby]

There has been lots of work on information visualization. It's not really like The Matrix, but attempts to be. Check out PNL's visualization team [pnl.gov]'s work. In Citeseer [citeseer.com], look for articles about Bead and Lyberworld.

I've done some work on this with a system called Yavi; can send a reference if you want. It's not hard to find lots of work on this. For an historical bibliography (1993 + prior), see my references here [unc.edu].