This week has seen the launch of The Miso Project, an “open source toolkit designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content”. It is a joint development between The Guardian (with Alastair Dant and Alex Graul at the helm) and Boston-based Bocoup (led by Irene Ros).
The first set of libraries released is entitled Dataset is a JavaScript client-side data ‘transformation and management’ library which makes life easier for visualisation designers by “handling loading, parsing, sorting, querying and manipulating data from all sorts of sources”.
Visiting the Dataset pages brings up a number of examples which showcase the different stages of a data transformation and management process. The main example shows Cabinet Office Spending and is presented as an interactive tree map to demonstrate selecting and connecting to remote data files as well as grouping data.
There are also a number of hugely helpful tutorials and complete access is provided to the API documentation and the source code via GitHub,
Miso is in active development and so expect a number of releases landing in the coming months. You can follow the project’s developments on the main site and via Twitter (@TheMisoProject).