Using Information Visualisation as an Analytical Tool
Dr Aaron Quigley (UCD)
IIIS Seminar Room, C.6002, 6th Floor, Arts Building, TCD.
The explosive growth in the use of computing technology means that organisations are generating, gathering, using and storing data at an exponential rate. The last US Census, for example, includes a large amount of data on 304,059,724 separate people. eBay handles in excess of 1 billion payments per year, and in July 2008 Google counted 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs on the web.
In this environment, simply storing raw data is of little value unless high-level information can be derived from it. Many researchers and commercial organisations are facing similar tasks with large amounts of image data, video, geographic data, textual data or statistical data. One approach to the problem is to convert the data into pictures and models that can be graphically displayed. The use of computer graphics to visually represent and convey the meaning of abstract information is known as "Information Visualisation".
This talk will outline how various types of information can be modelled, managed, mined and visually presented. Several large scale data and information visualisation methods will be described and discussed, as well as the 7 key challenges faced by researchers and developers who utilise visualisation technology. These challenges are: Empowerment, Connection, Volume, Hetrogeneity, Audience, Dynamism and Discovery.
Funding Bodies
