Name: semantic-colors
Owner: UW Interactive Data Lab
Description: Selecting semantically-resonant colors for data visualization
Created: 2013-10-26 00:16:11.0
Updated: 2016-07-21 22:29:43.0
Pushed: 2013-06-19 17:43:30.0
Homepage:
Size: 64
Language: C#
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README
Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization
Semantically-resonant color assignments (such as mapping “ocean” to “blue”) are useful in categorical visualizations, and can facilitate value lookup and comparisons.
This repository contains C# code that assigns a set of categorical concept names to semantically-resonant colors.
The algorithm makes use of images to determine frequent and discirminative colors for each concept name. It uses Google Image Search to query for relevant images. Project page: link
Main file: SemanticColors.sln
Dependencies
- c3_data.json - Needed for computing color name distances. Download to some place on your computer
- Google CustomSearch C# Library v1.3.0 - Add/Update the reference to Google.Apis.dll and Google.Apis.Customsearch.v1.dll to Engine.csproj
- You'll also need to sign up for an API key and set up a CustomSearch engine. There's a daily query limit for the free option.
- Create a new search engine with an initial site url.
- Then edit the engine, and remove the site from Sites to search. Change the selected search option to Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.
- Enable Image Search.
The code has been tested on Windows 7.
Usage
Usage: SemanticColors [inFile] [outFile] [paramFile] [renderDir]
- inFile - file with list of categories to assign colors. See sampleCategories.csv for an example
- outFile - output file where color assignments are saved
- paramFile - config file. See sampleParams.txt for an example where
- imageDir - is where images of concept names will be saved
- cacheDir - is where computed histograms will be saved and re-used
- jsonFile - is the location of the c3_data.json file
- apiKey - is your Google CustomSearch API key
- cx - is your Google CustomSearch engine id
- renderDir (optional)- If included, images of the color assignments and affinity scores for each category are saved in this directory.
