This week I reviewed 8 tools used for data analysis. Most of the tools were online based.  The tools looked at were AAT, Visualizefree, Darwin Ecosystem, Gephi, OECD, Gapminder, Klout and netlytic. 

AAT looks to be an online based tool used by AU. I did not get a username/pwd so was unable to give it a good look. 

Visualizefree is an interesting tool. Easy to use. Easy to figure out what you need to do in order to get data into it. One dissapointing feature is the need for Flash. I work on a Mac a lot and find that Flash is not friendly. That would impact my use of such a tool. 

Darwin Ecosystem is an IBM tool. The abilities are endless with this tool. Really it is many tools. My favourite is the PPI (Project Personality Interpreter). It analyzes text from speeches, emails etc and extracts personality traits for that person. Fascinating stuff, and a little scary at the same time.

Gephi is an analytic tool that is installed on your machine. Very good free tool for doing data analysis. 

OECD provides all types of data that is based on "themes". These themes are subjects like Health, Environment, Development, etc. The tool is an online tool where you break down the statistics provided by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. It is simple to use, basically choose your theme and break it down on subject matter and the data is provided in a spreadsheet GUI. Good for quick looks at data that is already in a format for looking at cleanly.

Gapminder was my favorite. They claim to be a fact tank not a think tank and provide, what I would call, dashboards with very interesting graphical representations. Tools are very easy to use. The website is fast and the data presentations are used to fixed misrepresentations of world development. Very interesting website. 

The last two I looked at was Netlytic and Klout. Netlytic is a Ryerson University effort used for social media analystics. The usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube can be interogated for your analyical purposes. There are some data limits based on how much you can use for free. But the tool looks promising and probably could be used for Comp 683 purposes. Klout is a tool that allows you to boost your presence on social media. You sign up for an account and Klout connects either to your Twitter or Instagram or g+ accounts (there are a few others) and gives you a score or ranking based on your activity. I think the tool would be great for those online who pontificate on all things that they think is there expert domain.

All of these tools are free to use. Most were easy to sign up for, and use. I personally did not know they exsited and found them interesting to learn about.

Paul