http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/EndBracket/default.aspx

http://www.weather.com/weather/map/interactive/

Every year companies ask me about how to integrate weather onto a spatial service like Mappoint or Virtual earth (for catastrophe modeling and general data awareness).

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx

http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/DMCommunity/_DMAddinLaunch/default.aspx

IN NO EVENT WILL GOOGLE OR ITS LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DAMAGES FOR LOST DATA, LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE OR COSTS OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES, HOWEVER CAUSED AND UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONTRACT OR TORT (INCLUDING PRODUCTS LIABILITY, STRICT LIABILITY AND NEGLIGENCE), AND WHETHER OR NOT SUCH PARTY WAS OR SHOULD HAVE BEEN AWARE OR ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE AND NOTWITHSTANDING THE FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY STATED HEREIN. IN NO EVENT WILL GOOGLE’S AND/OR ITS LICENSORS’ LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING OUT OF THIS AGREEMENT (WHEN AGGREGATED WITH GOOGLE’S LIABILITY FOR ALL OTHER CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF THIS AGREEMENT) EXCEED THE NET AMOUNT GOOGLE HAS ACTUALLY RECEIVED AND RETAINED UNDER THE AGREEMENT DURING THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE DATE ON WHICH SUCH CLAIM ARISES.

Got a problem with Google Apps - no problem - call the Google 1-800 number

"Phone support hours are Monday-Friday, from 1 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST. Outside of those hours, you will be able to leave a voicemail and let us know if your situation is urgent. When calling, you will need to provide your support PIN to access the system, and your domain name and customer PIN."

http://www.3dlivestats.com/

Forget a desktop PC - just hang a flatpanel TV in the lobby or breakroom and show where visitors are coming from and what they are searching for.

http://www.3dlivestats.com/tour.html

I'll return to the graph visualizations tomorrow...

Here's a first look at the network I'm visualizing in 2D

This is a circular layout and below is a symmetric layout technique...

The block in the upper right are hundreds of nodes I have not even connected yet.

Beyond the functionality needed to navigate and annotate complex network structures, layout is a fundamental key to taming the complexities these structures represent. 

Graph definition:
A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices and a collection of edges that connect pairs of vertices. A graph may be undirected, meaning that there is no distinction between the two vertices associated with each edge, or its edges may be directed from one vertex to another (from Wikipedia).

Most graph theory texts would describe good layout as the following:

• understandability - "does it tell the story the data contains"
• usability - "insight from looking at it vs. just a random layout"
• fabrication cost - "how long it takes to determine distance and location of each node"
• aesthetics - "how beautiful it is to look at"

Some examples of layout technique...

These layout techniques are powered by a Microsoft partner: Tom Sawyer Software.

Recently I have been doing a lot of work around Health Care networks and the complex diagrams that visualizing these graphs can form.  Is this BI?  Absolutely!  It just happens to be a form of BI that Excel and Dashboards and Scorecards can't really explain adequately.  Structure, flow, direction, clustering, and the dynamics of these networks are pretty pervasive ideas across all kinds of industries - it just so happens that health care is leading the market in tackling these hard problems (I'll admit that government entities like CIA, NSA and state and local law enforcement have had these tools for a long while - it's business that's just now figuring out how important visualizing these network can be).

By networks and graphs I refer to graph shown below...

While it's a little grainy, you can clearly see the distribution of items from John Doe in the center of the diagram and see that Tracie Duncan provides a supply line to John - this is a function of flow, as denoted by arrowheads on the lines.  This simple diagram would be hard to explain in a grid or list and yet most business applications use Lists or Grid-based UI elements to attempt to communicate this - even SFA and CRM systems do.

Another point, a diagram tool like Visio or even Powerpoint to depict this it feels like you take the life out of the diagram - these are visualizations of database entities, not a process that's fairly immutable.  Therefore, the tool must provide more than just zoom, pan and layout.  Some of the diagrams that I have seen are exceptionally complex.  People work for months and years to untangle and leverage the power of these diagrams - something that really is hard to do when the data is simply drained from a database and placed in a tool *away* from the changing data.  If a correction is made in the diagram, how does that go back into the network database? 

Here's a diagram that would take a while to unravel...

and one that wouldn't..

BTW, if you use PPT to do anything but show a picture of this type of diagram you are abusing PPT, and especially your audience, in my opinion.

To bring this point home, a customer told me when I asked how complex these diagrams could be...

"Imagine 20 people on their hands and knees crawling on a piece of paper stretched between Philadelphia and Baltimore on I-95 looking for interconnections and relevance between items the size of your watch"

... that paints a picture - don't you think?

So, a tool that proivides the fucntionality I described above needs to have the following features:

• Aligning Data with Task
• Importance of Overviews (orientation of where we are in the graph)
• Importance of Viewpoints as Favorites
• Importance of comments on Views, links, nodes and just general annotations
• Importance of when a link was formed or removed
• Importance of knowing the major players of a network
• Importance of applying data to nodes to show impact across the network
• Adding Watch Points to graphs – what happens to this node over time.
• Route Tracing
• Ad-hoc addition of nodes and links with some level of confidence measure that the link is correct

Here's a wireframe that attempts to cover some of the ideas described above...

I'll continue blogging about this work - next up - the importance of layout. 

I just wanted to see reaction from any readers - do you have structures like this in your business?

I have a new favorite professional book, DESIGNING INTERACTIONS by Bill Moggridge.

this book is incredibly deep and, at the same time, practical - with interviews with all the greats:
Bill Atkinson, Bill Verplank (my personal favorite), Will Wright, Larry Tesler, Stu Card, Bert Kelley, and on and on.  From Hardware to Software, from Business applications to iPod - very broad and very easy to read.

order it here: http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interactions-Bill-Moggridge/dp/0262134748/sr=8-1/qid=1171642253/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7588324-9568858?ie=UTF8&s=books

Want to see a small example of what this book has to offer?
http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/BillVerplank

I am involved with the Office 2007/Vista Launch in King of Prussia, PA tomorrow and I hope to see those of you who read this blog in the NJ/PA/DE area.

One of the demos we will be doing is a Visio 2007 data visualization feature.

It allows an on-demand "pitch and draw" of constantly changing from a database to be visualized in a Visio free form diagram with granularity of less than a minute.

Why is this important?  Well, you can automatically update a Visio diagram with Linked data sets in terms of minutes - which is sufficient for lots of applications.  But in the case of monitoring a critical process, seconds may be preferable.

For this demo I use a button to do the refresh and Bill Morein and I are working on a timer method for the near future.

Just one line of Macro code allows this - place a button on the Visio diagram and add this code:

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
ActiveDocument.DataRecordsets(1).Refresh
End Sub

I wrote a little application that simulates data changing in the background every second during the demo - here's the net effect...

Considering that this was a custom app just 3 months ago with lots of code to automate the Visio Object model and now, with one line of macro code, it's an out of the box experience - truly amazing!

http://www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp1.html

This is a great example of how WPF will change everything about the web experience - you'll need .Net 3.0 or Vista to view this.

You can pick a book from the stack and use your mouse to turn pages, or even riffle through the pages looking for something specific...

There's even a magnifying glass and some books (like Alice in Wonderland) even have Audio.

http://scorbs.com/workapps/woodgrove/FinanceApplication.xbap

If you are running .Net 3 or Vista, click on the link above.  You might have wondered why I've been posting about WPF periodically - what's it have to do with BI.  Well, I think this demo is clearly evidence that WPF moves BI apps into a much more compelling world.  Client richness, with web ease of deployment.

If you want to know more about WPF you can hit the following blogs...

David Betz  Peter Blois  Ruurd Boeke  Lee Brimelow  Laurent Bugnion  Eric Burke  Chaz

Doug Cook  Joseph Cooney  Karen Corby  Beatriz Costa  Dan Crevier  Nathan Dunlap 

Peter Fisk  Sean Geherty  Mike Harsh  Peter Himschoot   Valentin Iliescu  Robert Ingebretsen

Karsten Januszewski   Chuck Jazdzewski  Adam Kinney   Nick Kramer   Lauren Lavoie

Thomas Lebrun  Daniel Lehenbauer   Lester Lobo   Marcelo Lopez Ruiz   Joe Marini

Mike Marshall   Kevin Moore   Adam Nathan    on .net client stuff  Rob Relyea  Chris Sells

Ashish Shetty  Eric Sink  Tim Sneath   Ryan Stewart  Michael Swanson  Michael G. Emmons

XAML Chick  and of course, Chris Anderson from my Blog role.

http://blogs.msdn.com/visio/archive/2007/02/09/make-your-own-bubble-chart-part-1.aspx

http://www.dna-rainbow.org/chromosomes/1.html

This is an interesting visualization site - if only to see how incredibly complex and massive DNA sequences are.  The site breaks down Chromosomes 1 through 22.

Maybe you still know it from school: Each cell of a human being has two sets of 23 chromosomes, each set received from one parent. Every chromosome is a long and continuous piece of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) which contains many genes and other elements. The backbone of the DNA carries four types of molecules called bases (A, C, G, T). The sequence of these four bases encodes the information and is the genetic code of all of us.

We took the genetic code from huge data files and assigned a color to every of the four bases. Then we rendered these fascinating pictures, showing the genetic code of humans in color. You can see crazy structures and strange patterns in the images, best viewed when shutting your eyes just a little bit.

Click on a link to a chromosome above and use your imagination to get a new view of your genes.

It's getting to be tax time and I was curious...

It's a little dated, but I doubt if year (or even decade) change this too much.

Full Size Image

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/womack.html

Regardless of how you feel about the subject of Global Warming, there is an interesting debate brewing in the information visualization field about the graph that stole the show in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".

The Graph shows a correlation between CO2 and Temperature over the last few thousand years with a surprising hockeystick at the end of the graph and an extrapolated linear prediction that scares the pants off of people.

I just find it fascinating that this graph is the subject of so much debate - it pretty much shows that data and graphics and presentation may not be enough to convince people - either way.

The two sides are easily shown in these two sites:

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=19358

http://www.climatecrisis.net/

http://www.dundas.com/Gallery/Chart/Sharepoint/index.aspx?Img=Other6

Dundas continues its great data visualization work.  Check out their gallery...

http://dashboardspy.wordpress.com/