The annual Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference that concluded in Raleigh, N.C., on Sunday was extraordinarily rich in useful free tool tools for all sorts of data analysis and visualization, thanks to invitations accepted by computer scientists from Google, MIT, Stanford and the like. Here are links to 13 of these free tools that I found to be particularly useful for data analysis in journalism.
GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library Select language: [English][Russian][Portuguese][French/Francais] GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. The NEWS page describes the November 2009 GDAL/OGR 1.6.3 release.
OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.
F. Schmid. Proceedings of the 4. Internat. Symposium on Location Based Services & TeleCartography, 0, Department of Land Surveying & Geo-Informatics, HongKong Polytechnic University; HongKong, (2007)
F. Schmid. Proceedings of the 4. Internat. Symposium on Location Based Services & TeleCartography, 0, Department of Land Surveying & Geo-Informatics, HongKong Polytechnic University; HongKong, (2007)
G. Look, and H. Shrobe. IUI '07: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, page 309--312. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)