The work that Max Ogden has done in terms of making ETL something to easily do in browser is amazing. His earlier work (as you can guess from the name) was all layered on Couch but this can do so much more. Some of it is just the basic usefulness of writing costco style transformations in simple JS.
great stuff! I have been waiting for someone to produce widgets backed by a modern js framework (backbone.js in this case). Hopefully this means it is at least very easy to feed it data.
The timeliner is most definitely driven by TimelineJS from http://timeline.verite.co. Not sure if this is a related project or how exactly Recline.js is driving it.
Does anyone see what Recline.js is doing here over the functionality in TimelineJS?
Visualising data is only one part of what Recline does; you can edit and refine data in the browser, and plug that into a visualisation front-end which renders a map, a graph, a timeline or ... (etc)
[ disclaimer: i work for the okfn, but not on Recline. ]
JS really is a fine language for data.