Visual Business Intelligence
Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 4:17 pm
Almost all human beings, except for the blind or visually challenged, are by nature visually orientated. Our eyes constantly monitor our surroundings searching for things that are out of the ordinary. This real time interface between eyes and the visual cortex of the brain has helped the human race survive by quickly recognizing danger. The great thing about this is that we are also able to filter out all the noise. For example, if you want to mail a letter and during the trip from your home to the mailbox you see every little detail, you probably never get there. So we ignore the stuff that we already know or looks the same all of the time. Only the things that look different get our attention. At the present time this ability to quickly spot dangerous animals or other threats is most often used for other purposes: shopping! Store owners, website builders, they all try to grab our attention using visual stimuli. Recently I was at the new Starbucks coffee shop at Schiphol airport in the
Category: Analytics, BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
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Comment by dave mausner
Made Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 9:47 pm
A statistical visualization tool created in the late 60’s capitalized on the theory that humans are visually sensitive to human faces. The software input consisted of coefficients which were presumably within a small range, and created line-drawing faces whose features were grossly reshaped by minor data variations. We can do this using better technology today, but the concept is clearly ancient.
Note that nobody seriously used “faces” for huge data studies; better statistical outlier formulas exist which produce exception reports. That’s the eventual outcome of visualization.
Comment by Erik
Made Tuesday, 8 of January , 2008 at 3:06 pm
Hi Jorgen, other great examples (and I love Gapminder by the way!) are Swivel (http://www.swivel.com/) and Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/data). Many Eyes let’s you even upload your own data set (a spreadsheet or even a Word document)!
Comment by Rob
Made Wednesday, 9 of January , 2008 at 10:56 pm
Hi Jorgen and Erik,
Another example I like is JMP (http://www.jmp.com/).
It has some features like Gapminder, but it has also something like an “Advanced analytics for Dummies” toolset (mining data supported by visual representation usable for people that are not specialized in datamining techniques).
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