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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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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The Digital Dashboard
May 21, 2008
Taken from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/
“1) In information technology, a dashboard is a user interface that, somewhat resembling an automobile’s dashboard, organizes and presents information in a way that is easy to read. However, a computer dashboard is more likely to be interactive than an automobile dashboard (unless it is also computer-based). To some extent, most graphical user interfaces resemble a dashboard. However, some product developers consciously employ this metaphor (and sometimes the term) so that the user instantly recognizes the similarity.
2) Some products that aim to integrate information from multiple components into a unified display refer to themselves as dashboards. For example, a product might obtain information from the local operating system in a computer, from one or more applications that may be running, and from one or more remote sites on the Web and present it as though it all came from the same source. Hewlett Packard developed the first such product, which began as a tool for customizing Windows desktops. Called Dashboard, the HP product was subsequently acquired by Borland and then a company called Starfish. Microsoft’s Digital Dashboard tool incorporates Web-based elements (such as news, stock quotes, and so on) and corporate elements (such as e-mail, applications, and so on) into Outlook. Dashboards may be customized in a multitude of ways and named accordingly, generally, for example as a general corporate or enterprise dashboard, or more specifically, as a CIO or CEO dashboard.”
Successful Digital Dashboards are interactive and personalised. The most compelling digital dashboard solutions are built with Logi Info.
The Evolving BI Landscape
May 21, 2008
The BI Market is consolidating and continuing to evolve at considerable speed. The recent wave of acquisitions has resulted in 3 broad market categories:
1. Vertical Applications
2. Niche Value/Best of Breed Applications
3. Technology Platforms
The Vertical Applications market is evenly split between Oracle and SAP, both companies have acquired a multiplicity of BI tools and technologies and are focused on extending the value of the core applications offering.
Examples of niche/best of breed applications would be the newly emerging Qlikview or the Logi9 BI platform from LogiXML in the Reporting and Analytics space or Teradata/Netezza/Vertica in the high performance data warehouse space. Some of these products are new some have been around for a while and serve a particular niche well.
The third category Technology Platforms is dominated by IBM and Microsoft, both of these companies provide a complete ‘Information Server’ platform which can be used to source, package and deliver information to a multiplicity of different users.
Evolving in parallel to these 3 market categories is the open source BI movement, however despite offering a wide range of functionality at a compelling cost in terms of software acquisition. The costs which will be incurred over the full lifecycle of the solution are still far from understood.
However there appears to be a general reluctance among users of these platforms to deliver the end to end solution entirely from one vendor. The acquisition of the de-facto standard in enterprise reporting, Cognos 8, by IBM will definitely put this to the test.
Microsoft actively promotes both it’s own desktop/intranet focused tools and provides the platform for many niche players. An emerging alternative to the combination of IBM and Cognos in the coming year, will be the combination of the Microsoft ‘Information Server’ platform with the unified Business Intelligence offering from LogiXML, Logi9.
The successful entrance of Logi into this market was acknowledged by Gartner in the 2008 BI Quadrant.
Watch this space ………………….
Reports; the Building Blocks of BI
May 17, 2008
re·port (r-pôrt -prt)
n.
1. An account presented usually in detail.
Reports are the basic building blocks of Business Intelligence (BI) and like the humble building brick often ignored or underestimated.
Reports are the lifeblood of any business interaction, clear concise reports deliver the information which supports effective decisions and negotiations.
However the report as a source of requirements can prove to be unreliable.
Design your solutions to deliver information and then package the information into effective reports ……………….
OLAP and Analytics
May 17, 2008
an·a·lyt·ics (n-ltks)
n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
The branch of logic dealing with analysis.
Taken from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/
“OLAP (online analytical processing) is computer processing that enables a user to easily and selectively extract and view data from different points-of-view. For example, a user can request that data be analyzed to display a spreadsheet showing all of a company’s beach ball products sold in Florida in the month of July, compare revenue figures with those for the same products in September, and then see a comparison of other product sales in Florida in the same time period. To facilitate this kind of analysis, OLAP data is stored in a multidimensional database. Whereas a relational database can be thought of as two-dimensional, a multidimensional database considers each data attribute (such as product, geographic sales region, and time period) as a separate “dimension.” OLAP software can locate the intersection of dimensions (all products sold in the Eastern region above a certain price during a certain time period) and display them. Attributes such as time periods can be broken down into subattributes.
OLAP can be used for data mining or the discovery of previously undiscerned relationships between data items.”
An important element of any Business Intelligence deployment, OLAP cubes deliver vital packages of data in a rich and readily consumable form. OLAP has suffered from a lack of standards and remains proprietary technology for most vendors.
The advent of MDX the multi-dimensional query language at the heart of SQL Server SSAS has opened this up slightly, this standard has also been adopted by Cognos in it’s Series 7 and 8 product lines and by the open source project Pentaho.
As hardware capabilities constantly improve and specialised data warehouse ready databases come to the fore the jury is out on the future of OLAP technologies.
OLAP however, for now offers unique functionality which enables rapid analysis of multiple fact tables at different levels of granularity. MDX queries also allow otherwise complex queries to be implemented quickly and easily with a few lines of code. An example of this capability would be the comparison of year to-date sales figures for this year vs. last.
The stand out OLAP implementation in today’s marketplace is Microsoft’s SQL Server SSAS and the best way to extend this capability inside and outside your organisation is by deploying Logi OLAP.
