LogiXML Launch in the UK
June 29, 2008
LogiXML offers advanced reporting, analysis and visualisation products to enterprises for converting data into actionable information. Its unified platform covers business intelligence areas such as managed reporting, ad hoc reporting, analysis and data integration.
LogiXML provides web-based Ad hoc reporting for business users who want to create and run their own reports on demand, without waiting for IT to build reports for them. Its managed corporate reporting enables technical report developers to build web-based corporate reports and deliver them to various users and groups across the organisation.
Web-based OLAP analysis meets the requirements of users who want to compare and analyse their OLAP data. Specialized Data Integration helps users optimise data environment, pull and serve data from various sources and improve reporting and analysis performance.
The company claims to offer affordable business intelligence products to organisations worldwide. Its products are built on technologies that enable easy implementation, integration and upgrade.
Arman Eshraghi, founder and CEO of LogiXML, said: “With more than 22,200 software developers in 98 countries actively creating web-based reports with Logi products, LogiXML is confident that we have a solid foundation to expand our international business substantially in the near future and we are making an investment in that success with the establishment of the new international office.”
Eshraghi said that the company will now be able to serve its network of UK partners directly.
Web 2.0 - Visual Reporting with Text Clouds
June 29, 2008
A text cloud can be used to effectively display sales volumes, product profitability or just to analyse a web page. Text clouds offer visually effective reports which can deliver complex information in a simple easy to absorb manner.
Logi Info delivers a new text cloud element for web 2.0-style visualization of data. The relative font sizes and colors of words or phrases within the text cloud is an indication of their weighting, frequency or other numeric value.
The words or phrases may also be links, allowing further drill down into detail data.
From Wikipedia
“A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.”
Implementing Heatmaps with LogiXML
June 26, 2008
Currently Heatmaps are widely used in science and the financial sector, heatmaps are very intuitive and information dense or put another way, they are simple, easy to use and convey a lot of information, quickly.
Outside of specialist tools or alternatively pure graphics packages, the software world is being quite slow to facilitate the widespread adoption of the heatmap as an analytical tool. This is probably best illustrated by the inclusion of just the most basic Heatmap functionality in Microsoft Office 2007, which, while a good start and ahead of the pack in terms of delivering heat maps more widely, will need a few more iterations before this can help provide effective analytics.
LogiXML embed heatmaps in all of their reporting tools, Logi Info, Logi OLAP and Logi Ad Hoc, using Logi Ad Hoc, following installation of the software and establishing a data connection, the business user can start to develop and share Heatmap analyses, with colleagues, within minutes.
Using Logi’s flexible dashboard technology these Heatmaps can be combined into a dashboard style presentation without any programming or other technical input
Heat Maps in the Real World
June 26, 2008
Currently Heatmaps are widely used in science and the financial sector. Heat maps are an excellent way to visualise data, the reader instinctively knows what the information means.
To illustrate this by example, these Heatmaps are used on various financial and stock market Web sites. Nasdaq.com and SmartMoney.com both use heat maps to show stock price and various market sector performance at-a-glance.
Visitors to these sites can mouse over or drill down to get further details about a stock’s current performance.
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Heat Maps Defined
June 24, 2008
Heat maps are an excellent way to visualise data the reader instinctively knows what the information means.
However in trying to answer the questions “what is a heatmap?”, I found definitive information hard to find.
I eventually came across an article by Stephen Few which not suprisingly gives a clear and concise definition and illustrates this with some real life examples.
Multivariate Analysis Using Heatmaps
By Stephen Few
Published: October 10, 2006
This is the third article in a series that began in July with the article entitled, “An Introduction to Visual Multivariate Analysis.”
Prior articles in this series have examined how table lens and parallel coordinates displays can be used to explore and analyze multivariate information. In this article, I describe the use of multivariate heatmap matrices.
In general, the term heatmap refers to any display that uses color to represent quantitative data. We are all familiar with heatmaps in the form of weather maps, which use color to encode values such as temperature or rainfall. Heatmaps also come in forms other than geographical maps. When heatmaps are used to encode multivariate data – several variables that measure different aspects of some set of entities (for example, customers, countries, or products) – they are usually structured as a matrix of columns and rows. Figure 1 is a multivariate heatmap matrix, which displays a separate employee per row (the entities) and a separate measure per column (the variables). In this case, the heatmap’s purpose is to help us determine what factors most influence employee job satisfaction, which appears in the leftmost column labeled Working Conditions. Employees were asked to rate their working conditions as Very Poor (the lightest color), Poor, Acceptable, Good, or Very Good (the darkest color). Each of the other variables (Salary, etc.) has been encoded as a continuous range of grayscale colors, ranging from the lightest for the lowest value through the darkest for the highest value. By examining a single row, you can see a particular employee’s complete multivariate profile. By scanning a column, you can see the complete set of values for a particular variable across all employees, such as the average number of hours they work per week (the third column).
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Breaking out of the OLAP Lock Box
June 20, 2008
For many years OLAP cubes have been the mainstay of the most successful business intelligence offerings. OLAP offered almost instant access to the key business measures at the key ‘pulse points’ which determine the success or failure of your business, these can then be intuitively analysed according to the ‘business dimensions’ defined.
OLAP offered speed of response and business friendly information, when compared to ‘query by example’ offerings which were little more than simplified SQL the ability to analyse business performance and drill further into the detail to determine the root cause of good or bad performance at the macro level could add immediate value to any business.
The massive value add of OLAP technology encouraged a proprietary approach to the storage and access of data which inhibited the spread of OLAP based solutions, as a result these became the preserve of specialists rather than becoming fully embedded in the business.
The development and promotion of the OLE DB for OLAP standard represented the first step of many required to open up OLAP to allow it to become simply another source of data to be consumed by the myriad of available tools. However adoption was not widespread and many end user tools remain firmly based on the ODBC standards.
The convergence of Business Intelligence data and XML, which is expressed in the XML for Analysis standard (XML/A), makes the prospect of seamlessly integrating OLAP data into standard business reporting a viable prospect.
Conventionally integrating the information held in OLAP cubes, even those which conform to the existing standards, requires specialised tools or advanced skills (MDX, COM etc.). XML/A offers a way to quickly and easily integrate OLAP data from any of these providers into your existing reporting environment:
- Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (MSAS)
- SAP BW Infocubes
- Hyperion’s Essbase
The key benefit of OLAP analysis to a business is the ability to quickly analyse information over time and according to a set of pre-defined business dimensions. This delivers focused value added information directly to business users.
Evolving standards may soon make the original promise of OLAP a reality for all.
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