Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. Here’s how media outlets strive to make the data more accessible than its original form.

While the data will be released in stages over the next few months to the general public, five publications around the world have had prior access to the material. New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel were given access on condition that they observed common deadlines over the timings of release.

Wikileaks have created a set of interactive visualizations to give an overview over the amount, origin subject, categorization, program, topic and classification of the leaked documents. The visualizations are created using Tableau Public which seems to have a good adoption in the online journalism space lately.

The Guardian shows us in an information graphic where the cables come from. Furthermore, they have refined the dataset to be downloaded or accessed directly on Google Fusion Tables. The data can be downloaded from the Guardian Data Blog in in three versions:

• Every cable with date, time and tags, excluding body text
• The Guardian’s analysis of the cable by location and tag
• The glossary of keywords and tags

On a page dedicated to the Wikileaks release The Guardian collects all articles related to the publication.

El Pais has also published an information graphic showing the origin and amount of cables by country.

Der Spiegel Online has created an interactive atlas that maps the dispatches by country, classification and year of recording.

On a sidenote: Jer Thorp seems to be working on a visualization of the dataset already. See his Flickr set for the first drafts.

Are there any other visualizations based on the most recenty Wikileaks release? If you know of any, please share them in the comments.

Infochimps, the open marketplace for data, just released their updated Twitter Census dataset with over 1.6Billion Tweets. The data consists of various subsets for you to grab and play with.

While most of the subsets are free to use, Infochimps also provides some in-depth datasets. For $300 you can buy the dataset containing an hour-by-hour breakdown of the occurence of hashtags, URLs, and smileys in the 1.6 billion tweets created between March 2006 and March 2010. For $250 you can purchase a dataset extracted from those same 1.6 billion tweets with all mentions of stock tokens and related keywords.

Trst Rank

The Trst Rank is a reputation metric similar to the Pagerank algorithm used by Google to rate websites. It is based on a scale of 0-10 where 10 is the highest reputation possible. The related dataset is created using Infochimps very own Trst.me application.

The Color of Twitter

As an example @thedatachef and @jessecrouch from the Infochimps team have taken the Twitter Users by Background Color dataset to create the visualization above on their own. It shows the distributionof twitter profile page background colors. Unsurprisingly the default color is by far the most prominent hue.

From the USA to Australia and New Zealand to the United Kingdom. All data repositories are searchable directly from The Guardian’s search field making it even easier to find relevant data.

Via DataBlog from guardian.co.uk

Simon Rogers from the Guardian Data Blog takes a look at the latest (2007) figures about carbon emissions per country. China seems to take over the lead followed by the USA. The Guardian tries to communicate this information with a bubblechart showing the total emissions between 1997 and 2007. China shows a healthy growth (please, feel my sarcasm) of 102%.

The Data

The data is collected by the EIA and they try to extend the dataset with the new figures for 2008 by the end of this year. As a few commenters point out, it would be important to see the data per capita. The information is in the datatable to be used for further investigation but an infographic focused on this information would be more compelling in my opinion.

Google Zeitgeist are a set of lists ranking keywords by popularity from 1 to 10. Fastest rising and fasted falling are collections of keywords with big differences from 2008 to 2009. Right now there’s only the data as written text, but this could quickly be transformed into a visualization.

To compile the 2009 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.”

So get your tools ready and why not surprize us with your vision how this data could be best visualized.

Infochimps.org

With the provided service Infochimps.org encourages companies to open up their datasets. A secure place to host, share and sell data could ignite a more open culture with data. We are looking foreward to the progress that hopefully follows this announcement.

The IT Dashboard is a new website enabling federal agencies and the general public to view details of federal information technology investments.

The exciting part about this news message is the fact that the IT Dashboard is available to the general public. This means that government data is shown transparently to the people and tools to examine the data are also provided. According to Tim O’Reilly there was a big discussion about the workload of maintaining the data. Having this data public creates the urgency to keep it up-to-date, clean and making decisions based on what the data shows.

The visualization methods are rather crude. Pie Charts, Bar Charts and the indispensable Gauge show the basic data. Unfortunately the creators couldn’t resist the temptation to add some 3D to the graphics. A customizable Treemap visualization let’s the user drill down into more complex datasets. All the visualizations are created in Flash by using the Fusion Charts library.

All the datasets are also available as XML Feed or CSV. Furthermore, custom Data Feeds can be created and downloaded by chosing the source, selecting the required fields and adding filters for agencies. This seems to be another strong feature of the website and could provide interested users with exactly the data they are intersted in.

Read Tim O’Reilly’s View on the IT Dashboard.

The official description of Socrata

Opening government to new audiences and constituencies is the 21st century battle cry in societies everywhere. At the heart of this movement is open government data, readily accessible over the internet, in a form that maximizes comprehension, interactivity, participation, and sharing, delivered at a fraction of the cost of today’s data download sites. At Socrata, we call this social data discovery, and we’ve engineered a comprehensive suite of Web solutions for delivering social data discovery on government data sites around the world.

The Data

The datasets hosted on Socrata gets treated in a Spa-like manner. Nicely tagged and categorized each dataset has it’s own page that comes with a plethora of functionalities:

• Download the data in various formats (CSV, PDF, XML, JSON)
• Printing
• RSS Feed
• API result view
• User generated content: ratings and comments
• History of latest activity
• Charts and reports (coming soon)

A powerful feature is the tabular view of the dataset: The data can be explored, sort and filtered directly on the site. Large datasets are continuosly loaded as the user scrolls through the data to shorten loading times. Socrata even provides the code to embed the data in your own site.

As some of the datasets are very extensive the user has the possibility to filter the data. This filtered view can then be saved and used and shared as an indipendent dataset.

The Community

The Community part of Socrata comes with the most obvious social networking functionalities like user-profile, latest activity, followers, friends, etc. At this point we can hardly see greater value in this area but we’re looking forward to be proven wrong as benefits for individuals may emerge.

Find more information or visit my profile on Socrata.

Via VizWorld

It’s official description goes as follows:

Data.gov includes a searchable data catalog that includes access to data in two ways: through the “raw” data catalog and using tools. Please note that by accessing datasets or tools offered on Data.gov, you agree to the Data Policy, which you should read before accessing any dataset or tool. If there are additional datasets that you would like to see included on this site, please suggest more datasets here. For more information on how to use Data.gov, view our tutorial.

Infosthetics.com pointed out that these datasets are hardly accessible or understandable by the majority of people. Raw and machine-readable data is very interesting for developers to use it in their applications but for average readers it’s not suited to provide much insight. The data is the foundation from which understanding may arise if it’s communicated in a clear and understandable manner.

Let’s imagine a place where this data may be communicated in a more human readable way. The reader could choose a dataset, use an appropriate visualization method, mash the data with other resources, see what other users have done with the data and share his thoughts and insights. Does this ring a bell? Well, this is something already happening on the Many Eyes website or in the NY Times Visualization Lab. Maybe these forces could be grouped together and thus help making use of the data easier for the audience.

The Sunlight Labs have initiated the second installment of their Apps for America competition. The project rewards the best application built with data from the Data.gov website. It’s supported by Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb.

Via Infosthetics.com and SunlightLabs. Hat tip to chino.

The Data Catalog is currently rather slim but works as a testing ground for querys providing sample code for various languages like PHP, Javascript (jQuery & raw JS), Ruby, Flex, Silverlight among others. The Developers Page hosts documentation on the API’s query, format and paging capabilities.

We’re very happy to see public data getting this level of attention lately with Amazon, Google and now Microsoft stepping into this area. Making publishing data easy, secure and economic helps overcome some of the barriers in the way to open data utopia.

Via Azure Journal