Chart for list of boolean values

Question

I have a rather odd scenario. I am creating a web service for a scientific experiment. The output is like the following [0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 ...] I want to display this in a chart in our web page.

This experiment is an ongoing one, and thus, the list is updated every 2 seconds with 20 more fields. This is a time based chart - and the plan is to show the last 4 hours data in chart format. So, the total number of elements displayed are in the range of 4*72000.

The tool used here is YUI, since the values needs to be periodically updated.

What is a good chart for the same? I thought of a stacked bar chart but it does not support with random number of elements. Also, will it be very cpu intensive?

Answer 1

It's hard to guess what information you are trying to extract from the data.

If you chart the 1's and 0's against time, you will just get a very boring square wave:

1|   ____      _   __
 | _|    |____| |_|  |__|
0+------------------------>
           Time

That's not what you want, right?

My guess is you want to process the counts of 1's or 0's per some time interval (e.g. 1's per minute) and chart that. This means you will have much less data to plot (4*60=240)..