Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Diagrammatic Reasoning Related Research Sites

Interesting site for those looking at Data Visualization, OLAP and Silverlight application ideas, as I am.

Diagrammatic Reasoning Related Research Sites

Diagrammatic Reasoning Related Research Sites

and this to demonstrate a cube example.

http://www.wideman-one.com/gw/Models/sdsubigpic/DataCube1.htm

This is from '96.  How long has OLAP been around anyway?

According to the OLAP Report, before 1962...

http://www.olapreport.com/origins.htm

What's even more incredible than this tidbit of information?  Cognos Planning is based on APL, the OLAP language designed by IBM... and once again owned by IBM as of last year.  Over 37 years later.

Who has one of the most long-lived software products ever?  Oracle's Express, which has gone through over 35 years of development.

Who had features that are still not widely adopted?  Comshare's System W had these features:

  • Full non-procedural rules
  • Full screen multidimensional viewing and data editing
  • Automatic recalculation
  • Batch integration with relational data

#1 is in IBM Cognos Applix TM1.  I can see Silverlight hitting number 2 pretty easily with a writeback cube and a cube browser.  #3 is in Analysis Services.   #4... well... that would be nice.  I have built a few custom solutions around merging MDX & SQL data.  It would be great to see these pulled into a single view without writing complex MDX.

Oracle might offer #4 with its materialized views.

Which OLAP server didn't integrate with Excel when it was first released?  Microsoft OLAP.

What's the most popular BI tool in the world?  Microsoft Excel.

So the killer app to promote Silverlight adoption for BI (other than installing it for the MS downloads site) is to create a Silverlight visualization plugin for Microsoft Excel (Services?) and PerformancePoint.

I guess I've answered my data visualization question.

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