I am a "Media System Design" student while working at the IT Security Department and I've been impressed by the idea of presenting Logfiles in a graphical way to determine the relevant information at first glance.
Because of that, my thesis, which starts in Feb 2007, deals with that issue and is focused on a interactive manner browsing(!) the graphical map. As a "Media System Design" Student, Data Visualization is a very interesting issue and matches perfectly to the content of our studies.
Well, I am a hard-working student and so I've already read some books of Edward Tufte, did some research with colleagues and designed some studies about the so called "Visual Logfile Browsing".
The description of my project is:
"Nazar is a Visual Logfile Browser. It is designed as a Multipurpose-Application to present Logfile Content in a new-fashioned browsing manner provided by the Nazar-Flash-GUI. Instead of just reading Logfiles, you're able to browse them graphically and determine the relevant information at first glance."
"Browsing" means that you’re able to zoom in or out, move or delete nodes, switch the view by selecting another information level, watch the scene by shifting through the seconds of an event (not implemented yet), determine more information by moving the mouse over an element and so on.
The project is in development, so I have to admit, that most of the functions aren't implemented yet. But - I hope that I'll be able to present you a working version this year. Up to now, the scalability is one main problem. I haven't tested it with a huge data set, because 'Threading' isn't implemented yet and would certainly cause it to hang up reading a big amount of data. So - please - see it as a design study and nothing more.
Most of the text on my website is written in English. The upcoming "demo videos" are spoken in German. Nazar runs on Windows Systems, and requires Perl (Active Perl) to provide the parsing function.
Every hint and advice is welcome.