An InetSoft BI Webinar: Example of Visual Analysis of a Multi-dimensional Data Set

This is the continuation of the transcript of a product demonstration of InetSoft's BI software for dashboards, reporting and mashups. The presenter is Byron Igoe, Product Manager.

Question: I am suprised by how much interactivity there is this visualization dashboard. But I am wondering how do the slider bars work?

Byron Igoe (BI): For instance in this little simple example of visual analysis of a multi-dimensional data set provided by the US Census Department, the slider is usually bound to your numeric data. Here you have got some sliders for these different pieces of census information.

Question: Now are you able to implement a slider because you have got the data running in a cache or separate in-memory database?

BI: So here is actually a pretty major technological differentiator from other BI solutions. Everything that we do is server-side. Whereas with a lot of the other dashboard products out there, our model is that the all the interactions are actually going back to the server, the server is doing the data caching, the data aggregation, sending queries to the data sources. So it’s a client-server model, but the client in this case is the Web browser.

Question: I have not seen many other BI vendors do sliders except maybe SAP or Business Objects Excelsius, which is really doing them in Excel, and then myDIALS actually spins off data into a memory cache with dimensional database, so it’s a separate set of data. But it sounds like here it's this just more of a filter?

BI: It’s a filter, yes. And I will show a couple of other sliders that are actually used as inputs, such as in a projection or What-if Analysis, such as in this next example over here. Just a quick couple of things over here, the selection lists are all tied to each other, so in addition to a chart updating, you also see the other filters update to show compatible values.

So if I choose the West region, I see the two divisions within that region, the states within that region. This hierarchy is not explicitly defined, it’s basically intuited based on the data set itself. So you will discover patterns and compatibilities that you may not even be aware of, and this is also true with the sliders. So I am filtering here on the house values, I see divisions in states dropping off until here these are actually the top three states in term of median household value.

And then similar to some of those other visualization products, you can also edit what’s being displayed on the chart and how. And so we have got household on the X axis and density here on the Y, so if I wanted region on the X, I just drag it up here, and it updates for me, but again we are inside the browser using nothing more than HTML5.

Now I have got federal spending level displayed as colors, but I can also do categorical colors such as for region. I could remove a field from the shape charting option, and see all the data as bubbles. There are other metrics here, maybe the homeownership rate. Let's display that as color. It’s continuous value metric, and we can customize the coloring spectrum, if we want.

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