Data visualization is the delivery of a visual representation of data, reminding us of the old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words" The main goal of data visualization is the representation of data from organisations of all complexities and deliver it clearly and effectively through a graphical interface, coupled with the agility and velocity to enable managers to make informed decisions fast.

Good decision-making is always dependent upon having enough of the right information. Data Visualisation solutions have therefore developed, providing a means of collecting vast quantities of data in data marts or warehouses, and then displaying results of queries or reports, either as tables or graphs.

Such tools normally require skilled users who have detailed knowledge of the underlying data and its structure, both to create the reports and charts, and often to identify, highlight, and even explain the relevance of data to decision-makers. With information from both structured sources such as enterprise applications, and unstructured sources, doubling on an annual basis, the management of the sheer volume increasing in complexity. Hence, providing near real-time analysis across large data sets, such as in the financial sector, requires significant resources.

There is a solution

Panopticon's technology enables large amounts of information to be presented visually to accelerate analysis and understanding. By representing data either streamed in real time, low-latency or stored in spreadsheets, databases or OLAP cubes as colour graded , with smooth, animated navigation into, out of, and across the data, users are able to intuitively unearth important trends and relationships. The graphical interface displays data to an exceptionally high level of fidelity, and the behind-the scenes tools are easy to use.

So, with Panopticon's Business Visualisation tool you can:
• Analyze large, complex or real-time data sources quickly and accurately
• Navigate easily and intelligently through your data based on visually identified outliers, anomalies and patterns
• Monitor or replay time series and events to spot hidden trends
• See the big picture and the underlying detail at the same time

Panopticon's data visualization software helps banks, retailers, manufacturers, telecommunications firms, engineering organizations, and other industries make timely and informed business decisions. Panopticon combines innovations in three areas:

• World class, academically validated information visualizations, including Treemap, Heatmap, Heat Matrix, Line Graph, Scatter Plots, Bar Series, Stack Graph and Horizon Graph visualizations.
• Business Intelligence monitoring and analysis functions
• Ability to connect to virtually any data source, including real-time streaming feeds, relational databases, OLAP servers and proprietary data formats

The Panopticon platform is available as an SDK that enables software companies and corporations to embed these capabilities into their own applications.

The company also offers productized enterprise and desktop versions (Panopticon EX) of its tools that companies can deploy quickly. Panopticon software helps users find hidden patterns, spot problems and identify opportunities buried in mounds of data. It allows people to quickly see and comprehend useful information in large datasets - including those constantly updated in real time. The system supports effective and timely decision making and makes it easy to synthesize, present and share results with colleagues and customers. Customers typically see a very fast ROI on a Panopticon implementation since these visualization tools allow users to work far more productively and make more profitable decisions more quickly.

Traditional techniques like graphs and charts are well understood methods for displaying static information. However, these techniques are generally unsuitable for handling dynamic information; that is, data that is constantly changing and being updated from several different sources. Static visualizations often fail to handle extremely large quantities of data or are weak when the extents, bounds and structure of a data set change.

Dynamic data poses substantial problems for technology design, which probably explains the relative lack of successful applications until now. A well known shortcoming of static graphs and diagrams is the inevitable compromise between overview and detail. In an image showing the general picture with aggregate values, there is no access to details. In a diagram showing detailed information, the big picture is hidden.

Simple bar charts, pie charts or other classic graphs can serve well for presenting information on an aggregate level, but are practically useless when exploring large amounts of new, unknown data. Traditional diagrams are merely static drawings that cannot show relationships or structures in understandable ways.
You must be able to see multi-levelled hierarchies, interconnections and details on individual objects in order to solve problems, understand complex relationships or identify areas of concern. This forces users to revert to data tables and spreadsheets when they really need to find out about something - at the expense of overview.