June 2nd - Linking Visualization

I have decided to begin my work the "data insertion tool" by finding a way to link visualizations (like manyeyes) to the wiki. I am not sure how to write a code that connects to a website, supplys my data, uses their visulization functionaity, then copies and pastes the 'share link" to my wiki. Gchart4mw is a graphing tool that uses Google Graphs. The way it does its visulization is by converting input data into one long URl and supply it as a source to the HTML img tag. For example, the graph below is just an image with the following URL (note how the various data is included like country names and title):

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300x150&chtt=Arabic+Countries&cht=p3&chd=t:75,13,100,63&chl=Iraq|Syria|UAE|Egypt

GoogleCalendar uses the same approach.




How can I write a code that connects to a website, supplys my data, uses their visualization functionality, then copies and pastes the 'share link" to my wiki?

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According to today's meeting, I have to design the user interface for my tool. The problem is, I am still not sure what features it should exactly have. A feature which I know will extremely helpful is browsing to a spreadsheet to insert it in the wiki.

• This tool, which I believe is developed in Harvard, does that; you copy and past cells from excel and it converts it to a proper wiki markup table format. I might try to contact the author, or I might be able to develop something similar myself.
  
• This is another tool. It is written in Perl and you have to have it to populate the wiki with data. You also have to supply your wiki page URL, user name, and password.
• A third tool. It lets you copy and paste data or upload it from a file.

Interesting data visualization toolkits:

• Flare. But it requires flash.
• Prefuse.
• Google Motion Chart.
  

Idea: Related to Steve's user case. You insert a char, say temperature over 100 years. But you only focus on 50 years. So you set that scale in the tool. The user after that can scale the years from 1 to 100. We can read the limit on the x-axis and set a range.