Here you can find useful information on how to use Rhizosphere. If you want to develop it, or adapt it to your needs, you may want to take a look at the developers' area.

What is Rhizosphere ?

Rhizosphere is an innovative approach to help user navigate and filter through their data. Nowadays you're submerged by tons of data and informations, stored in a variety of different places: the cloud, websites, spreadsheets, other formats used by your applications. 

More often than not, you have to operate decisions on such data, filter them and isolate the exact information you want, that you know it's there but it's lost amidst the noise generated by all the other informations as a whole.

Until now, you have probably always navigated through data using only one paradigm: the table ( either on the web or inside your spreadsheet application ) that you can sort, filter and attack in 20 different (counter-intuitive) ways to locate the exact cell you were looking for. If you have been lucky enough, you may have experienced some more innovative approaches, such as mindmaps, treemaps. 

Rhizosphere is a web-based interface, that can load your data from multiple sources and offers smart, simple and effective ways to organize your informations and filter them according to your needs. It leverages paradigms that have become famous as part of the web 2.0, such as information clouds and tagging.

What are the Rhizosphere features ?

Once Rhizosphere has loaded the dataset you want to analyze, you can benefit from the following features:

• Desktop-like metaphor. You can move around your items and organize them in many different ways using
  
• Drag'n'Drop
• Selections
• Zooming
• Data Manipulation and Visualization
  
• Dynamic Filtering
• Real-time layouts that highlight relationships
• Automatic or user-driven color coding
• Cloud representations
• Interoperability
• Multiple datasources. Implementing a new datasource is ridiculously easy.  It interoperates with the Google Visualization API and can load data from any Google Visualization Datasource.  You can even use a Google Spreadsheet.
• But still,  very flexible. If you want full power, you can provide your own model and rendering rules to display your data.
• Rhizosphere can be used standalone, embedded in other web pages, as a Google Gadget, or also within a Google Doc.
• Lightweight
• You just need a browser to use Rhizosphere. If your data are local, you don't even need a connection to the internet.
  

How can Rhizosphere be used ?

At the moment, Rhizosphere can load its data from two sources:

• a Google Visualization API datasource. This includes every spreadsheet used within Google Docs.
• plain javascript files that define a model according to a very simple syntax. See the samples in the Developer Docs to get started.
  

Rhizosphere data can then be browsed :

• in a standalone browser window
• inside a Google Gadget, that can be embedded in a Google Doc or be placed in your iGoogle homepage.

In both cases, Rhizosphere provides a mini view, when you don't want to waste to much space on your screen (useful for embedded contexts) and a fullscreen view (when you need as many info as possible ).

Ok, I'm ready to play with it

Start with the available How-Tos :

• How-To: Use in a Google Spreadsheet
• How-To: Use in your iGoogle page
• How-To: Standalone Use