Spicing up your tabular data with some charts and graphs is always a good idea. It helps your users reading and understanding your data better and makes your information system look a bit nicer.
Most systems are judged on the visual impression of their front-end, no matter how strong and complex your database concept might be. So never forget to polish the user interface a bit up before releasing it. Just have a look at some software reviews in Apple forums and you know what I’m talking about.
However, nice designed charts help users to quickly understand what the data is about, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Searching for libraries to dynamically draw charts I came over PlotKit. It looks very interesting and I’ll definitely have a second closer look at it. What I’m wondering is, if you could modify PlotKit in order the get some nice thematic SVG maps drawn. Easy and quick interactive online maps, good usability and no need of setting up an entire mapserver environment.
Since thematic maps basically are sort of charts, graphical elements representing data, it should be possible. Well, I’ll see…
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