Your. FlowingData: study themselves and visualization of data in reports

Every day, each of us accepts a number of decisions and makes a lot of actions. Actions develop into habits, and habits, in turn, shape behavior and personality. Nathan Yau, the applicant PhD degree in "Statistics" in the University of California Los Angeles, became interested in the possibility of self-observation in October 2008. Since then, his web service Your. FlowingData became an original tool for collecting and analyzing data about yourself by users, building a data visualization. If desired, each person can share with everyone automatically generated pages report.

The essence of the YFD is to collect user information, and building Web-service reports using a variety of data visualization techniques. Register on the web service is not required - going through your account on Twitter. Next, enter the command of the three components, and Your. FlowingData.com stores it in its database and based on the data content and builds a time bar charts, scatter charts, and line graphs. Information is entered in several embodiments:

• directly via the web interface YFD;
• personal messages via Twitter for account @yfd;
• using the iPhone app;
• using the commands in the Mozilla Ubiquity.

Each team consists of the following components:

• action name (required in the Latin alphabet and without errors, edit later that the team can not only remove and re-enter)
• numerical value (for the measured value), or text;
• keywords with the character # (required in the Latin alphabet and the grid is placed in front of each tag).

For example: eat cheese # 200gr. Action - eat, eaten category - cheese, keywords - # 200gr. If the data is entered incorrectly, then at any time you can use the editing information.

On the page of each action is displayed frequently used categories and time of day when they happen. data visualization in the form of a calendar is also provided with a heat map (color intensity shows frequency use categories in a given day), shows the number of categories of records, the number of sub-categories and use keywords. Clicking on any of these days there is release of information about the actions and their categories. Also present filtering by category and keyword action.

Each action can be one of the types of data in accordance with which to construct a corresponding graph or chart. If in the above example is based is a bar chart and a vertical calendar with a heat map, then Measurement data type built scatterplot.

Schedule time series. Present in each category. Shows the amount of a phenomenon of the total weight. The data is shown broken down by day, week, month. The time frame in every phenomenon chosen 7/30/90/365 days. Provides filtering layers of action - should be increased in size, and the rest disappears.

A set of actions may be submitted in the form of a "flat wood," and the tag cloud. Standard methods for visualizing data. Nathan original in another - experimental tools for time duration, the cross-correlation between the activities.

To summarize, it should be noted that Your. FlowingData - this is a very original web service. Together with its originality it may be incomprehensible to most people. Your. FlowingData designed for researchers who want to learn their habits to adjust their lives and become better. The only requirement for using YFD - to develop the habit to collect data about themselves.

Your. FlowingData