One incarnation of the (vaguely defined) dataweb that I've illustrated on this blog involves providing statistical results to a query. The example I gave was querying a system for the number of bloggers in China and getting back a result which, breaking with current search result models, wasn't a list of 'relevant' documents, but instead a plot of the estimates for this variable plotted over time. For reference, the post is here.
Recently, John Furnari (Cognos Grassroots Marketing Specialist) dropped me a pointer to the Cognos enterprise search product. I checked it out and, in amongst the marketing materials, spotted something that had some resonance with the above idea in a video of Cognos' CEO talking about their technology. After some interaction with John, Delaney Turner (Manager, Product and Solutions Communications) has furnished me with some screen shots. The pick of the litter is shown below.
What you see here is a search for 'revenue' resulting in a graph (not a document!). Conceptually, I see this as a big deal.
They probably should have put "Cognos revenue" in the search box, as I spent way too much time looking at that screen shot trying to figure out why the results that came back were for Cognos ;)
Posted by: P-Air | January 30, 2007 at 03:33 AM
(Note to the previous comment: since this an enterprise product, I would imagine all queries are filtered with that context applied).
I agree that this is a fundamental shift. Visualization is the only way to manage data overload in the long term. Interestingly, this year's state of the union speech produced a ton of visualization metaphors - much more so than usual. My favorite was a "tag cloud" of all presidential speeches in US history: http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/
Posted by: Rahul Roy-Chowdhury | January 30, 2007 at 07:56 PM