Since InfoMesa is essentially a content visualization concept, the question of visualization comes up a lot. I tend to be a purist when it comes to the term visualization. In other words, to me, conditional formatting in Microsoft Excel is *not* visualization.

There's a concept of not recreating the wheel in InfoMesa, but really staking out new ground - ground that has been heretofore too expensive or too exclusive for many customers and making it pervasive and easily accessible and flexible across many different domains. InfoMesa certainly has its roots in Life Science, which I still consider the high water mark for complex knowledge work. The need to ingest voluminous datasets and find digital needles in digital haystacks and also "telling stories" with data sets is increasingly important in the sciences.

One of the technology sketches that I have been working on for the next phase of InfoMesa is to understand if we could insert a "generic" visualization mechanism inside of InfoMesa that would make InfoMesa relevant not just to Life Science but to any industry dealing with "gnarly" data all the time.

So here is an idea that I'll fly past you. What if...there was a visualizer tool that launches a composer inside of InfoMesa. This composer will allow a scientist to connect directly to diverse data sets, but also multiple data sets - in this way, this composer is actually creating a visual datawarehouse in a sense by meshing heterogeneous data types and sets. With data being pulled from both proprietary data sets on premises and also from cloud data sources this seems critical.

This diagram imports an image (in this case an image of the planet Mars at high resolution) and maps it onto a 3D sphere and then outputs to the display. the display in the final analysis would actually be inside of InfoMesa, but you get the general idea. Pressing Play will create the image below...it is a 3D navigation window - the model can be rotated, zoomed and panned and perhaps most importantly, multiple views can be stored and replayed.

This is a simple example, but let's get a bit more complicated...Here's a diagram that creates a sphere that maps the texture of the Earth to it and then ingests the recorded history of earthquakes from SQL Server (lat/long based) which also includes depth of the quake.

The diagram places the depth of the earthquakes as "spikes" that extend beyond the crust of the Earth to show where the quake occurred (by lat/long) and how deep the quake was. Here's the end visualization.

OK, so let's explore how flexible this method can be. Let's do something more analytic. Let's ingest data from three different datasets and map them together visually. This is a Cardiovascular study that shows patients by Gender (blue/pink) by condition of Cholesterol, Blood Pressure and Max Heart Rate.

Here's the visual. The Axes get "Auto-Generated" and the plots clearly show general behavior and outliers. So, the method seems to map quite broadly across the problem domain set.

Here's another diagram that creates a Naval Electronic Warfare example - the idea of telling a story with data...This diagram imports two pre-built 3D models (Akula and USS Dallas - hello, Hunt for Red October) and then ingests sonar mapping and textures the seabed floor. There is a lot going on here - tens of thousands of data points are in play.

Here's the resulting image from a "birdseye" view...

By rotating the viewer we can look from USS Dallas' perspective against the sea wall...

...here's a view from the stern of the Akula...the detail is striking...

OK, enough wackiness with submarines - back to reality - can we start to get close to what a molecular viewer does? Let's import an e.Coli protein with X,Y,Z of atom and atom type (Nitrogen, Carbon, Sulfur, etc.) and see what we can come up with.

Here's the result...not too bad - but still a long way from cartoon views, backbones, etc, but you can see how we would handle waters and possibly even iso-potentials.

I'll continue to work on this concept, but wanted to socialize it to get some basic feedback...

Introducing Firefly, a project I've been working on with LifeScience/Pharma companies for a while now. Like InfoMesa, the goal is to make this available broadly, so that the community can see Microsoft's strengths in visualization and sensemaking capabilities. Firefly is designed to ingest any network - any collection of nodes and their associated edges, perform readable layouts, provide navigation and implement social networking capabilities to bring insight into these typically complex and intimidating data structures.

Firefly is a Windows Presentation Foundation Application, just like InfoMesa. In fact, Firefly is likely to become part of InfoMesa as a network visualizer in the near future. This is the first post and I'm not quite ready to post the code for general availability, but that's the goal and I think we will be there soon. Firefly will allow someone to point the tool at any database (be it SQL Server, Access, Microsoft Azure Storage [SSDS], or Oracle) and define what the nodes are, what the edges are and Firefly does the rest. Firefly performs a layout of the data, persists it and allows navigation and annotation of the space.

Whenever visualization is employed there is a mantra or sorts that should be remembered: Overview-Detail-Filter-Drill for attributes. This mantra gives the basic needs of any visualization: provide a context for the whole data set, allow drill down into that universe, Allow filters to that data set and bring additional, linked values to the surface.

1. Overview - a zoomable, pannable look at the universe of nodes and edges in the entire graph
2. Alter Visualization - Emphasize/Under emphasize visual elements using color, opacity and visibility - i.e. make the edge lines yellow and faint.
3. Edge Analytics - Find most influential nodes - i.e. Show only the nodes that have 5 to 20 edges - the high influence nodes
4. Search for Nodes by Name - just type or select a node name and Firefly finds it for you - useful when the graph is large
5. Metrics weighed to each Node - allows visualization of addition Channels of Information as an overlay on the graph - radius and color can be mapped
6. Cross Hair for selecting nodes for detail (double-click will pin the cursor to a node)
7. Stored Views - Clicking create View in the top left corner will store the window constraints (x,y, wide, high, scale) to create quickly navigable neighborhoods of nodes and edges

Once you select a node, you can switch to the detail tab (located at the top of the screen) and view just that node and it's associated edges.

Clicking on any node moves that selection to the center and the graph "blooms" to show that nodes associations.

A word about layout and mapping. Since Networks and Graphs are without orientation (or coordinate systems) it is important to create a sense of constancy for the user - in other words, where stuff tends to be is always where it is. Geography is this way and so are star maps (yes, I know there are variations, but the orientation of constellations nearby one another makes it possible to find collections and constellations rather easily).

So, after Firefly creates a layout we freeze that layout and store it (or persist) for exploration - this is different than many other applications that simply reapply layouts - for small networks, persistence doesn't matter, but for large ones you quickly loose orientation.

I will post more information as we go and a new InfoMesa post will be up in a week or so.