Professional standard software for creating original vector-based graphics. Includes powerful drawing tools and brushes.
The ai file format is a common vector format for exchange and its feature set allows creation of complex vector artwork. Illustrator imports over two dozen formats (including PDF and SVG). Of particular use to data visualization is importation of SVG, or scalar vector graphics, which is an W3C recommendation, and is often exported from other programs.
Photoshop is a comprehensive photo editing tool produced by Adobe Systems. Users can manipulate photos, graphics, and other raster images using a variety of tools and predefined filters. Photoshop also allows users to record specific photo editing steps, which allows for automated batch processing. Photoshop is available as a stand-alone product, but is also part of Adobe's "Creative Suite" family of products. Photoshop Extended is an enhancement to Photoshop, and provides for enhanced 3D creation and editing.
Asymptote is a vector graphics language that can be used for technical drawing.
Being a language, it gives ultimate control to the user. Typesetting of labels and equations is done by LaTeX, which produces high-quality PostScript output. It provides a portable standard for typesetting mathematical figures and generates output in PostScript, PDF, SVG, or 3D PRC vector graphics.
GIMP is an open source and free alternative to Photoshop. It is intended for use with Raster graphics, and can be used for creating new images, retouching photographic images and converting files to different file types. Gimp supports most image file types as well as other graphical image manipulation program file types. It is also possible to create custom scripts to automate a variety of tasks.
Google Charts is a combination of two application programming interfaces (APIs), Google Chart API and Google Visualization API. Google Chart API creates static visualizations of data and embeds them into webpages. Some HTML programming experience is recommended. Available visualization types include standard scatter, line, bar, pie, and box charts as well as Venn diagrams, dynamic icons or callouts, formulas, and connectivity graphs. In addition, maps can be made and embedded into webpages.
JMP is a desktop software package designed by SAS for dynamic data visualization and statistical data exploration. JMP includes an interactive graph builder that supports a wide variety of two- and three-dimensional graph types, and statisical reports are displayed along with plots for assessment and interpretation. Data can be loaded into JMP from common desktop file formats (e.g. text and spreadsheet files), as well as from a database or SAS server, and reports and visualizations can be exported in HTML, PDF and Adobe Flash formats for displaying and sharing results.
Keynote is an Apple's presentation software. Presentation software is primarily used for composing "slides" for presentations. Emphasis is on graphics and animation. Keynote files can be saved as PowerPoint.
MATLAB is an interactive data analysis and visualization environment that can be used to perform computationally-intense operations on large data sets efficiently. MATLAB also provides a high level programming language that supports rapid development of work-flow scripts and Graphical User Interface applications to automate repetitive tasks. A wide variety of discipline-specific software libraries, called toolboxes, are available from the publisher or user communities to extend the capabilities of the base program (e.g. statistics, curve fitting, image analysis and mapping).
NodeXL is a free, open-source template for Excel 2007 and 2010 that lets you enter a network edge list, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the Excel window.
You can customize the graph’s appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph’s layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate graph metrics. Networks can be imported from and exported to a variety of file formats, and built-in connections for getting networks from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.
GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.
OriginPro is an expanded version of Origin, both of which are software for data management, statistics, and graphics. OriginPro is point-and-click interactive software and uses multiple windows to manage data and run analyses. A variety of graphics can be created using a graph editor and exported for incorporation with the Microsoft Office suite. Data management is done through worksheets bundled into project management files.
Panoply is a cross-platform application which plots geo-gridded arrays from netCDF, HDF and GRIB datasets. It supports the following operations:
Photofiltre is a simple, free image editing application that offers the standard adjustment functions (Brightness, contrast, dyed, saturation, gamma correction), layers, and also artistic filters (watercolor, pastels, Indian ink, pointillism, puzzle effect). Photofiltre can also use Photoshop plug-ins.
PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data, and is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS. PSPP can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, linear regression and non-parametric tests. Its back-end is designed to perform its analyses as fast as possible, regardless of the size of the input data. You can use PSPP with its graphical interface or the more traditional syntax commands. Some benefits are that PSPP uses SPSS files and is compatible with OpenOffice and can support 1 billion data observations.
R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed.
SAS is an integrated system of software that enables everything from data access across multiple sources to complex manipulations of data files to performance of sophisticated statistical analyses and data visualizations. Three of SAS' most popular software products that are commonly used by ecologists are Base SAS, SAS/STAT, and SAS/GRAPH. SAS is available for Windows and UNIX platforms. GUIs make SAS accessible to novice users and the command-line interface facilitates development of programs for complex data processing.
SigmaPlot is a commercial software package primarily used for data analysis and publication-quality visualization. Data can be input directly into a table or imported from basic ascii or Microsoft Excel files. Data summarization (e.g., mean, sum) and analysis tools (e.g., parametric and non-parametric statistics, regression, and correlation) operate on the data at a click of the mouse. Graphs or charts in 2-D or 3-D (e.g., line, bar, and pie charts, histograms, heat maps, surfaces) are created via a wizard. Batches of files can be analyzed and graphed automatically.
Stata 11 is software for data management, statistics, and graphics. Stata uses point-and-click interaction and help to guide users through tasks. Logs can be created and stored as repeatable scripts, so that data management and analysis are completely documented. Users can perform statistical analyses ranging from basic statistical summaries and linear regression models to multilevel mixed-effects modeling, generalized linear modeling, resampling and simulation, and many multivariate analyses. A graph editor allows users to produce figures based on the data and statistical models.
