Here is the back-story.

We have a client that needs to add significant graphing capability to their site and we are determining which open source tools to integrate with to meet this requirement. We always strive to have our work be reusable, so I thought what would be the most valuable thing we could do with a graph for each of our clients.

Many of our sites are variations of communities of practice. In a community of practice the users are interested in finding other users like themselves, and seeing where they are different from others. They may also be interested in new users and perhaps who are the old timers.

Our project with Cesar centers around social book marking in a proprietary corporate setting. Thus the primary way users are alike is if they use the same tags. This is the X-Axis of the graph. For our first iteration we will use the date registered as the Y axis. For our next iteration we may integrate with an open source social network analyzer such as Six Degrees of Separation.

I want to thank Cesar for his support and blogging about us and his excellent ideas on this topic. I also want to thank Prem Thomas of Yale University for his inspiration. Our project with him involved integrating with, and creating a community around, a visualization tool he created to help understand diabetic care in hospitals. Its great work and has inspired us here at Solution Grove to incorporate more visualization into our sites. Case study and site launch for the Yale site are coming soon. Below is a demo of the bookmarking tool that Cesar refers to.