Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
through design and technology development. In doing so, we have had
an opportunity to witness how the industry has evolved inside the walls
of almost a hundred businesses, spanning the most data-intensive of
industries. As time has progressed, the volume of available data has only
increased, and so has the latent potential of information that can be gained
from it. Data is now literally everywhere, waiting to be tapped for actionable
insights.
As the realization that visualization is needed to make sense of it all has
grown, so has the realization that visualization systems must be highly
interactive. It is not sufficient simply to plot data and view it, just as it
is not sufficient to simply compute an answer and present it.
Analysis
is
an interactive process of rapid query, answer, and exploration, involving
computational processes, visual display, and visual manipulation. In the
early 2000s, dissatisfaction with the perception of visualization as simply
an output channel led the research community to coin the term
visual
analytics
to better represent and promote the interactive sense-making
aspects of analysis.
Another awareness that has grown with the increasing size and complexity
of information problems in business is that a basic palette of line, bar,
and pie charts is rarely enough to express all of the valuable information
available, and to leverage it for decision-making. Richer forms and
combinations of forms are needed. Graphs, as it so happens, are one of the
most valuable.
Graphs in Business
We have been helping organizations visualize and analyze graphs for almost
25 years. Graphs have been around much longer. One of the first graph
problems was a deceptively simple question by Leonhard Euler: Was there a
route so that each of the seven bridges in Königsberg, Prussia (now known
as Kaliningrad, Russia), would be crossed only once, as shown on the left of
Figure 1-1
. Euler simplified the question into a graph, as shown on the right
of
Figure 1-1
.
Since then, obviously many more problems have been analyzed as graphs,
in business as well as science. Many such problems are geographic, just like
Euler's.
