Data Applied

| brunocm, on May 1st, 2009

I ‘met’ Dominic Pouzin today on Analytic Bridge where he had posted some information about a really cool data exploration tool he recently developed – Data Applied.  I was blown away by the graphics and visualizations I saw, and as importantly the user interface and usability looks unique – to me this looks like a next-generation tool.

Per Dominic it is still in alpha, although by the case studies on his website it seems to have been used extensively already.  He’s not sure when it’ll be released as he’s tempted to keep adding functionality.  Maybe he could consider rolling out what he has now, after all as a web-based service I wouldn’t think it would be too hard to add and upgrade features, and even offered tiered services – if that was presumptious of me I apologize

I think today’s data is in dire need of this kind of visualization power.  I think today’s analysts need this kind of tool to help them explore, collaborate, publish, and disseminate ideas (see The Gallery part of the tool).  At the end of the day, adoption of advanced data analysis (again esstential in today’s data rich world) at today’s corporations could be greatly advanced by better visualization techniques.  I only say ‘could’ because so much depends on the culture in which you operate.  How do you build teams and departments around analytic processes?   I think organizations today are challenged to ‘take it to the next level’, and there is a certain gravity to the situation – use your data or die.

Granted I don’t understand yet what drives the algorithms (and I haven’t used the tool).  Nor do I know the price point.  But like fax machines (remember those), the transformational power of something like this will be determined by the number of people using it.  Heck at the right price-point I would even consider a personal license of something seemingly this powerful.  It would almost be career suicide not to leverage it.

As a separate discussion, it would be great to see such tools made widely available to educational institutions, and it would be interesting to see development of educational tools being built around this kind of technology.  How could we make it easier to teach these topics to today’s kids? … sorry i digressed there for a bit.

Below are some questions I would have for Dominic and maybe he’ll answer them at some point.  Right now I just need a place to keep them…Dominic if you somehow see this feel free

How long did it take you to create the tool?

What languages/tools did you use?

Can I connect to my MS SQL database?

How did you come up with the very robust visualizations?

What is the largest data set that you have analyzed using your tool?

And ok, underneath it all (can you discuss?), are you relying on open source (and very powerful) algorithms (like Weka, R), are you using proprietary algorithms, both?

Ok, I’m tired.  Good night.