Schemaball

Am feeling a bit guilty after being so negative towards the poor symbiowhatsit consortium. To make up for it here's something positive: a link to Martin Krzywinski's homepage at the BC Cancer Agency's Genome Sciences Centre.

Martin is responsible for Schemaball (found via Information Aesthetics) which is an open source Perl script that visualises SQL table schemas.

Schemaball produces images called schema balls. Schema balls are schema visualizations in which tables are ordered along a circle with table relationships drawn as curves or straight lines.

That's cool in itself, but his homepage also links to other goodies like Circos, which creates very pretty circular visualisations of sequence alignments, conservation and other such sequence features. Some of the screenshots are awesome (well, I thought that they were. I like genome visualisations, the mileage of your awe may vary).

Obviously there's also a lot of non circular diagram related material - a regular expression cooker and this interesting page on language fingerprints, for example.