New material on the GGobi book web page

The GGobi book is now available from Springer and Amazon, after quite a delay. Getting the figures printed correctly was difficult.

Solutions to the exercises in the back of each chapter are available for instructors by emailing Springer.

The movies on the book web site are currently being updated to include sound.

Hack-at-it 2007

The GGobi Hack-at-it 2007 was held just before useR! 2007 in Ames Iowa.

The main focus this year was on the data pipeline again, and on pipelines in other software.
Several projects were discussed: the geometric shapes, high-dimensional games, local neighborhood brushing, metabolomics data preprocessing.

The first business meeting of the GGobi Foundation was held, too, working on the by-laws, and other operating procedures.

Geometric shapes

If you haven't seen them already, be sure to check out Barret Schloerke's geometric shapes. He's an undergrad student who's been working with us over summer to generate a variety of high-dimensional geometric shapes to explore with GGobi.

The data includes cubes, spheres, simplexes, polyhedra, polytopes, and mobius-like objects, ranging from from 3d
to 10d. For each object Barret has made a data set, image, short movie and the R code necessary to recreate the data.

http://streaming.stat.iastate.edu/~dicook/geometric-data/

GGobi 2.1.6

Just a quick note to let you know that GGobi 2.1.6 has been released
and is available from Windows, Mac (with easy installer) and Linux
from http://www.ggobi.org/downloads. The changes are largely internal
with a few more bugs being fixed.

We are working on getting rggobi on to CRAN now, and we hope that it
will be available for all platforms within the next week. If you are
using rggobi, you might want to hold off on upgrading GGobi until
then.

Again, GGobi 2.1.6 is available from http://www.ggobi.org/downloads

Static and dynamic graphics course, July 2007, Salt Lake City

We're pleased to announce a one day course covering static and dynamic graphics using R, ggplot and GGobi. The course will be held just before the JSM, on Saturday, 28 July 2007, in Salt Lake City. The course will be presented by Dianne Cook and Hadley Wickham.

In the course you will learn:

• How to build presentation quality static graphics using the R package, ggplot. We will cover plot creation and modification, and discuss the grammar which underlies the package.



• How to explore your data with direct manipulation/dynamic graphics using GGobi and rggobi. You'll learn the general toolbox, as well specific approaches for dealing with missing data, supervised classification, cluster analysis and multivariate longitudinal data analysis.

Dianne Cook is a full professor at Iowa State University. She has been an active researcher in the field of interactive and dynamic graphics for 16 years, and regularly teaches information visualization, multivariate analysis and data mining.

Hadley Wickham is a PhD student at Iowa State University. He won the John Chambers Award for statistical computing in 2006 for his work on ggplot.

For more details see http://lookingatdata.com

Hack-at-it

Hack-at-it 2006

Aug 3-5 the GGobi developers got together in Seattle, WA for the second hack-at-it. The setting was a rented house, with high speed internet and a lovely garden in which to work and talk.

The main topic of this year's hack-at-it was the ggobi pipeline. Plans were laid to restructure the backbone of the software to make it more extensible, and programmable from R. Most of this will be invisible to the user, but the results will be obvious in new graphics types and applications running from R.

GGobi 2.1.4 released

We are pleased to announce the release of GGobi 2.1.4. This is another bug fix release, fixing a few annoying crasher bugs, as well some xml and linking bugs. It is available for download now from http://www.ggobi.org/downloads/.

This version offers improved compatibility with rggobi and we hope to release a new version of rggobi with many new features very soon. We are also working on an easy mac installer, which hopefully will be ready in the next couple of weeks.

If you do encounter any problems please email the mailing list - your feedback is appreciated.