

D3, which stands for Data Driven Documents (in programming jargon, a web page is also known as a document), wasn’t made specifically for mapping. Mike Bostock, now of The New York Times, had all types of data visualizations in mind when he built the library (it’s written in JavaScript) as a PhD student at Stanford.
Bostock thought every other tool missed the point. Each was a proprietary suite of tools for creating visualizations, but they were all disconnected from their ultimate destination: the web. Bostock’s big idea was that the web browser could be used as a completely inclusive mapping and data visualization tool. -Wired