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javargraphicsvisualizationtag-cloud

Is there a dynamic word/tag cloud Java API somewhere?


There are loads of great word and tag clouds available, the most prominent being wordle.net. But I am looking to display something akin to what some folks did for a twitter replay of the 2010 world cup, just not using flash. I'm not too familiar with R, but it seems to be the best tool for generating some statistical decay of font size over time. Is there a Java API (or combination of APIs) that might make this capability easier from the start?


Solution

  • I'm not aware of a good R package for that. There are some functions, like cloud in the snippets package, and maybe other functions, but nothing compared to http://wordle.net, http://tagcrowd.com/, or Many Eyes. Drew Conway has done some nice stuff with tm + ggplot2; I also played with it a while ago, but this was more of to play with 3D tag cloud (with rgl) than wordle.

    enter image description here

    In Python or Processing, there are some ongoing projects detailed on this related question. To my knowledge, Tagxedo looks great but it has no API and it relies on Silverlight.

    Pierre Lindenbaum also has some Java code, see his blog post Playing with the Wordle algorithm: a tag cloud of Mesh Terms.