May 14th

I am happy about the discussion we have just had, because now I have some clear ideas about what we might possibly do regarding date simulations. What I will be working on for the upcoming days includes:

Looking at some of the existing tools:
I have already checked several ones like EdGCM and CCCma Model. These GCMs have a simple interface. They mainly display a world map with some data (like temperatures, sun radiation, or rain fall, etc.) plotted on it. These tools allow the user to change the year. A sample is available at:

The second set of tools, which I think will be really useful, is Google Motion Chart and IDL. GMC uses a table containing date, region, and value entries. So it requires all data sources to be in a particular format. This won't be the case in our tool, but we can assume uniform input in the beginning. Like the previous GCM, the user can scroll the year. GMC has a sample code (I am not sure in which programming language) but it would be very useful. I will study that in more detail and see how motion is achieved and how data is read ( Google Visualization API && Google Motion Chart).

The website Maria mentioned in her wiki (http://www.gapminder.org/) has several examples of dynamic graphs made using Google Motion Chart, but the presentation ideas were quite variant. So this is an interesting place to dig into. Other places I will start checking are http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/ && http://www.astr.ucl.ac.be/users/matthews/jcm/ which professor Steve told us about.

What does the tool look like?
I don't know why, but I keep imagining our data simulation tool as a web browser plug-in. When you are browsing a graph in a website, there might be a small triangle at the bottom of the graph. When clicked, it opens a new tab and allows you to play with the graph.