Ontopia 5 2 1 Released
August 15, 2012
Ontopia’s Blog has posted an extremely brief notice: “Ontopia 5.2.1 Released.” The post states that “This is a minor release which fixes the vizigator and vizlet in the distribution.” (Vizigator is a nifty graphical visualization too.) It then refers us to the release notes, which state:
“This release is a minor bug fix release, which includes the fixed vizigator and omnigator vizlet.”
The following bugs have been fixed:
- Issue 438: Vizigator is not starting on Mac!
- Issue 439: TopicNameComparator might throw NullPointerException
- Issue 440: bat file pointing to noneixisting jar file in 5.2.0“
Ontopia‘s suite of open source tools help developers build applications based on Topic Maps. This important open source technology is an international industry standard for information management and interchange. A couple of developers have been working on Ontopia for over a decade, and new participants have been pulled in from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway.
Ontopia 1.0 was released in 2001, and the core engine is considered very stable. The software is released under the Apache License 2.0. Because the entire product is released as open source, there are no essential proprietary add-ons. Several options for commercial support are available.
Cynthia Murrell, August 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Digimind Explains Visualization
July 10, 2012
The Digimind Blog recently published an interesting post about visualization entitled “Harness the Power of Data Visualization With Digimind.”
According to the post, Data Visualization is a way to make complex unstructured content more visually appealing and digestible. Digimind’s competitive intelligence search engine utilizes this technology so that any search query generates an interactive word cloud.
The article then goes on to explain how this technology works by using the example of the trending Apple versus Sony trending news.
After showing the word bubbles that appear once the It sums up by stating:
“Unsurprisingly, Apple gets a lot more coverage, the main topics around the Apple brand talk about the iPad because of the coming release of a new Microsoft tablet. Google reacted to Apple’s last keynote introducing maps by cutting the price for Google maps usage.
Meanwhile, Sony garnered coverage relating to the release of xperia.”
I really enjoyed ready this post because it explains the way that visualization works in very easy to understand terms.
Jasmine Ashton, July 10, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
The Mash Up Mixing Bowl
July 10, 2012
InetSoft Technology is mashing search technologies together with the availability of new custom data connectors for popular enterprise applications. This big mixing bowl will add connectors to the list of supported third-party data sources that do not already have open standards based connectivity according to Times Union’s article, “InetSoft Adds Google Analytics, AdWords, and Microsoft SharePoint as Data Sources for BI Dashboarding”.
The new InetSoft technology provides a smooth mix with an efficient transformation, as:
“Style Intelligence is a full-featured business intelligence solution for dashboard reporting that includes a powerful data mash-up engine. End-users get visually compelling, highly interactive access to data, and IT gets a highly customizable, easy to learn and quick to deploy business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform. Data mash-up capabilities allow for the integration of disparate data sources, enabling agile development and providing maximum self-service, while the application’s SOA architecture and open standards-based technology make for an ideal embedding and integration-ready application for dashboards, production reporting, and visualization.”
Those who take advantage of this new quick mix technology will get compelling visuals, along with highly interactive access to data. The IT department will find the technology easy to learn and highly customizable with a convenient business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform. The end result, InetSoft has mashed up search technologies into a big mixing bowl of efficiency.
Jennifer Shockley, July 10, 2012
A Visual Way to See What is Changing Within Wikipedia
July 9, 2012
Wikipedia is a go to source for quick answers outside the classroom, but many don’t realize Wiki is an ever evolving information source. Geekosystem’s article “Wikistats Show You What Parts Of Wikipedia Are Changing” provides a visual way to see what is changing within Wikipedia.
The performance program was explained as:
“Utilizing technology from Datasift, a social data platform with a specialization in real-time streams, Wikistats lists some clear, concise information you can use to see how Wikipedia is flowing and changing out from under you. Using Natural Language Processing, Wikistats is able to suss realtime trends and updates. In short, Wikistats will show you what pages are being updated the most right now, how many edits they get by how many unique users, and how many lines are being added vs. how many are being deleted.”
Enlightenment was gained when actually viewing the chart below:
This program calculates well defined reports on Wikipedia’s traffic, and Wiki frequenters might find the above chart surprising. The report in this case shows the reality that Wikipedia is an over flowing pool of information.
We are not saying Wikipedia is unreliable, but one should never solely rely on one information source. The chart simply provides a visual way to see what is changing within Wikipedia and help users understand how data flows. This programs potential for real time use on other sites could be tremendous.
Jennifer Shockley, July 9, 2012
User Friendly Tools from Q-Sensei
June 29, 2012
Q-Sensei puts ease-of-use front and center with its latest announcement. Melodika.net reports, “Q-Sensei Announces First Set of Data Visualization Modules and Dashboard Page for Q-Sensei Enterprise.” The new tools help users get the most out of Q-Sensei Enterprise 2.0, a platform that pulls together data from a myriad of sources. The write up tells us:
“The visualization tools help end-users graphically understand and digest the unified data set. The dashboard page serves as a personalized portal of visual displays of user-relevant and user-defined data.”
“Graphs automatically provide dynamic ‘zooming’ for micro-level details on the data attributes straight from data points on the graphs. . . . Each user can select from a variety of visualization options to suit his/her needs — line, scatter or bar graphs on time-series analyses as well as quick-settings for one-, two- and three-year trending time frames.”
The story includes links to screenshots from the application: one showcasing the visualization tools and a shot of the dashboard.
Q-Sensei emphasizes multi-dimensional search, which it defines as combining full-text and dynamic faceted search with real-time content analysis. The award-winning company was created in 2007 with the merger of the German Lalisio and the American QUASM, and now has offices in both Brooklyn and Erfurt, Germany. Q-Sensei vows that its solutions make it easy to find what you need, even if you don’t have the proper keywords at your fingertips.
Cynthia Murrell, June 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Document Previews: Necessary but Tricky in Some SharePoint Installations
June 22, 2012
Users find laundry lists of results a necessary but sometimes hard to use way to pinpoint needed information. Users looking for a PowerPoint presentation want a way to spot presentations without browsing, opening, scanning, and repeating the process. One feature of SharePoint is its document thumbnail and preview function. Instead of a list of text results, SharePoint can display search results with a thumbnail image of the document. Users can quickly identify a document type, which allows a research task to be accomplished more quickly.
There is, however, one challenge in some SharePoint installations. According to the document Office Web App & FAST Search Document Thumbnail and Preview scenarios, many users found document previews and thumbnails to not show up in FAST search results for SharePoint 2010. Microsoft acknowledges:
“Document Previews do not work with Claims Based Authentication and is a known limitation with the Product.”
Microsoft’s knowledge base article provides a number of ways to resolve the problem. But what does a SharePoint administrator do when a third party application is part of the mix? The SharePoint licensee needs immediate access to deep expertise with both SharePoint and Fast search are required to ensure that system performance and functionality are maintained at a high level.
Comperio, one of the world’s leading firms in Fast search engineering and consulting, can resolve preview issues quickly. Comperio’s engineers have in-depth experience with both SharePoint and Fast search. If you want to tap document previews using Microsoft’s native functions or employ third party software from firms such as BA Insight (www.bainsight.com), Comperio delivers. Comperio combines experience and technical expertise for leveraging Fast search within SharePoint. For more information about Comperio, visit the firm’s Web site at www.comperiosearch.com.
Jennifer Shockley, June 22, 2012
Sponsored by Comperio
Data Visualization Solves One Piece of the Analytics Software Puzzle
June 6, 2012
We came across an interesting summary of visual mining for bioscience in the form of an abstract from PubMed from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The background, results and conclusions were shared in, “Methods for Visual Mining of Genomic and Proteomic Data Atlases.”
Analytic software is in an interesting place currently. Users demand a high level of scientific reasoning within an intuitive and efficient tool. Data visualization is part of the answer as it enables the user to interact with diverse and complex data directly manipulating it on screen.
The paper both discusses and provides illustrations regarding an approach to developing visual mining tools capable of supporting the mining of petabytes of information. For laypeople like my colleagues and I at Beyond Search we stuck to reading the text.
The paper concludes with the following thoughts:
“The mining of massive repositories of biological data requires the development of new tools and techniques. Visual exploration of the large-scale atlas data sets allows researchers to mine data to find new meaning and make sense at scales from single samples to entire populations. Providing linked task specific views that allow a user to start from points of interest (from diseases to single genes) enables targeted exploration of thousands of spectra and genomes.”
While we thank the authors for their work on the subject, they must understand that visualization is not a silver bullet.
Megan Feil, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Findability and Design: How Sizzle Distracts from Understanding
May 9, 2012
I have been watching the Disneyfication of search. A results list is just not exciting unless there are dozens of links, images, videos, and graphs to help me find the answer to my research question. As far as I know, Palantir and several other analytics companies have built their businesses on outputting flashy graphics which I often have a tough time figuring out. My view is that looks are more important than substance in many organizations.
I read “Designers Are Not a Panacea.” I agree with the basic premise of the write up. Here’s a passage I tucked into my reference file:
Rather than granting designers full control over the product, remember that they need to play nice and integrate with several other aspects of your business. You need to remember that you are building a business not a pretty app. A designer co-founder could help (as could a sales co-founder), but does not offer any guarantees that you will make good business decisions, regardless of how “beautiful” an experience your application offers (not to say that adding more engineers does). Visual aesthetics are rarely enough. Getting a product into the hands of potential customers is important.
The write leaves an important question unanswered: “Why is the pursuit of visual flashiness now so important?”
I have several hypotheses, and I don’t think that some of these have been explored in sufficient detail by either the private equity firms pumping money into graphic-centric search and content processing companies. Here goes and feel free to use the comments section of this blog if you disagree:
First, insecurity. I think that many professionals are not sure of their product or service, not sure of their expertise, and not sure of their own “aura of competence.” Hiding behind visually thrilling graphs distracts the audience to some degree. The behavior of listeners almost guarantees that really basic questions about sample size and statistical recipes used to output the visual will not be asked.
Second, mislead. I think that humans like to look at pictures and then do the “thinking fast, thinking slow” thing and jump to conclusions for social or psychological reasons. The notion of an in depth discussion is something I have watched get kicked into the gutter in some recent meetings. The intellectual effort required to think about a problem is just not present. A visual makes it easy for the speaker and the listener to mislead intentionally.
Third, indifference. In a recent meeting, several presenters put up slides which had zero to do with the topic at hand. The speaker pointed to the visual and made a totally unrelated comment or observation. No one in the audience cared. I don’t think most people were listening. Fiddling with smart phones or playing with iPads has replaced listening and old fashioned note taking. The speaker did not care either. I think the presentation was prepared by some corporate team and the presenter was trying to smile and get through the briefing.
What does design have to do with search? If one looks at the “new” interfaces for Google and Microsoft Web search, I noted that neither service was making fundamental changes. In fact, Google seemed to be moving to the old Excite and Yahoo approach with three columns and a bewildering number of hot links. Microsoft, on the other hand, was emulating Google’s interface in 2006 and 2007.
Visualization systems and methods have made significant contributions to engineering and certain types of mathematics. However, for other fields, visualization has become lipstick designed to distract, obfuscate, or distort information.
In US government briefings, visual sizzle is often more important than the content presented. I have seen the same disturbing trend at analytics and search conferences. Without accountability from colleagues and employers, design is going to convert search and findability into a walk through Disneyland. The walk is fun, but I don’t think an amusement park shares much with the nitty grit of day to day revenue generation from software and services.
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Visualization Roundup: Are Pictures Easier Than Math?
May 5, 2012
Want your data to have visual impact? Visualizations can be a great tool, and MakeUseOf provides some strong examples in “5 Coolest Places to Find Visualizations on the Web.” Be judicious in their use, though, some visualizations are just distracting.
MakeUseOf’s Ryan Dube writes:
“I went out in search of some other sites that offer cool and interesting ways to represent data in a non-text manner. Visualizations let you display a huge volume of information or statistics in a very small space, making them an excellent way to present study results or poll results in a way that is really easy to understand and to spot patterns.”
Dube returned from his search excited about five sites. IBM’s history flow graphically displays the editing history of Wikipedia pages. It clearly illustrates times when a page was spitefully deleted, as well as insight into the growth of certain topics. (It’s also kind of pretty.)
Despite its name, FleshMap is not R rated, though I’d give it a scholarly PG-13. This site focuses on human desire, exploring “the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation” in popular culture. It might be best explored after leaving the office.
The last three sites, IBM‘s Many Eyes, Visualizing.org sponsored by GE, and UC Berkeley‘s Visualization Gallery, each serve up large collections of visualizations. Much time could be wasted at any of these sites. Oh yeah, and if you want to create visualizations yourself, they can also provide a wealth of examples.
Cynthia Murrell, May 5, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
SAS Gets More Visual
March 31, 2012
Inxight (now owned by BusinessObjects, part of the SAP empire) is history at SAS or almost history. Now the company is moving in a different direction.
Jaikumar Vijayan writes about a new visual analytics application recently unveiled by SAS in his article “SAS Promises Pervasive BI with New Tool.” Einstein is believed to have once said “computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” We noted this passage from Mr. Vijayan’s write up:
Unlike many purely server-based enterprise analytics technologies, Visual Analytics gives business users a full range of data discovery, data visualization and querying capabilities from desktop and mobile client devices, the company said.
The initial version of the new tool allows iPad users to view reports and download information to their devices. Future versions will support other mobile devices as well, SAS added. The quote is actually a good description of the concept that underlies Visual Analysis. The process uses analytic reasoning to detect specific information in massive amount of data. For example, a clothing manufacturer might use it to determine current trends in ladies’ fashions. The results are presented in charts and graphs to the users, who can fine-tune the parameters until their specific queries are answered.
SAS is known for its statistical functionality, its programming language, and its need for SAS-savvy cow pokes to ride herd on the bits and bytes. Will SAS be able to react to the trend for the consumerization of business intelligence.
While the technology is impressive, SAS may be a little late to the game. Palantir and Digital Reasoning have already introduced applications that offer clients powerful Visual Analysis capabilities. Time will tell if SAS is able to catch up to some competitors’ approach. We are interested in Digital Reasoning, Ikanow and Quid.
Stephen E Arnold, March 31, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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