"Open Indicators" software

Yesterday I travelled to nearby University of Massachusetts at Lowell for a presentation on a new software tool that will become available to the public in the coming months. The software is called WEAVE, which stands for Web-based Analytic Visualization Environment. It’s a new tool for data visualization and analysis, sort of a Swiss Army knife for data. Development of WEAVE has been funded by a consortium of institutions, mostly governmental and educational, that wanted a single package for doing statistical analysis, data graphing, and GIS plotting. The Umass Lowell group, let by Professors William Mass of the UML Center for Industrial Competitiveness and Georges Grinstein of the UML Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, has developed this amazing piece of software. Best of all, WEAVE will be available as open source software to non-profits and public entities. As the professors said, this tool can utilize any data from any source.

Members of the consortium that has paid for the development of this package will get to try it out starting next month. The available-to-the-public version should come soon after. I couldn’t find a demo version on the web that I could link to, so you’ll have to trust my assessment for now. I’ll stay on top of the roll-out of this product and will continue to write about its progress. So if a free tool that allows you to crunch data and to plot it on maps and charts all on the same screen at the same time sounds like it might be of use to you, please look for more news about WEAVE in the coming weeks and months.