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107 days ago

Has it really been since April since I posted an update? How embarrassing. It doesn't mean I've been slacking. Firefly is making good progress. Here's a view of the Universe Tab - using a circular layout. You'll notice a lot of improvements in the app: comments, links, synchronized detail and context views and hover over effects. Some things that are not as obvious: a label in the top right corner showing the textual explanation of what someone is looking at. It's amazing to me how important this is for networks (actually for any visualization). One of the new items that is obvious here as well is the addition of metrics as mapped to each node. The metrics are represented as circles (really ellipsis, but who's keeping score?) The Size of the circle is one metric and the color represents the other. You can use the same metric if you want to reinforce the value by magnitude and color. Filtering has been expanded to allow a user to look at nodes and edges that ...

Firefly - Here come the Layouts!

225 days ago

I had a chance this week between a zillion conference calls to put some time against Firefly. The objective for me this week was two fold: get the signature going and get the layouts under control. What's a signature you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked. When we load the network, we perform a histogram on the entire network. This is shown in the Edge Influence Evaluation Tool midway down the left. Here's a close up: The signature shows the overall "connectedness" of the network. In this case, there are zero cases where nodes have zero edges and 4 cases where nodes share one edge, but the majority of the nodes have one edge and one (at the end) has 5 edges. Come to think of it - it's easier to show than to explain. I really like showing the histogram when allowing filters and I'll do the same for the metrics (coming soon - perhaps Monday). This provides a bit of analytics and I also have some thoughts about suggesting various layouts to the user based on the ...

Firefly - getting closer with the overall look and comments

228 days ago

I have a demo of Firefly today and decided that I would do a quick post to help myself "rehearse" a bit of the features we will talk through. For the record, this is about half way through - which is code for "kind of messy". I prefer to code and get the hard stuff our off the way and wired up and then work through the polish and beautification stage. It drives some people batty... First off let's take a look at the overall application...The red cross hair is used for selection purposes. Double-clicking on a node will center the cross hair on the node - we use animation to smoothly tween between positions and it comes across nice - almost like a video game. The view also shows commenting (with Text and Links - more on that in a minute) and Viewpoints - the large hollow white square on the left, bottom portion of the graph. The Left control panel has been almost completely redone. Starting from the top left: Size to Fit - reset the zoom to include the ...

InfoMesa - "Visualizers" instead of "Viewers"

246 days ago

Since InfoMesa is essentially a content visualization concept, the question of visualization comes up a lot. I tend to be a purist when it comes to the term visualization. In other words, to me, conditional formatting in Microsoft Excel is *not* visualization. There's a concept of not recreating the wheel in InfoMesa, but really staking out new ground - ground that has been heretofore too expensive or too exclusive for many customers and making it pervasive and easily accessible and flexible across many different domains. InfoMesa certainly has its roots in Life Science, which I still consider the high water mark for complex knowledge work. The need to ingest voluminous datasets and find digital needles in digital haystacks and also "telling stories" with data sets is increasingly important in the sciences. One of the technology sketches that I have been working on for the next phase of InfoMesa is to understand if we could insert a "generic" visualization ...

Firefly - a Network Sensemaking tool

252 days ago

Introducing Firefly , a project I've been working on with LifeScience/Pharma companies for a while now. Like InfoMesa, the goal is to make this available broadly, so that the community can see Microsoft's strengths in visualization and sensemaking capabilities. Firefly is designed to ingest any network - any collection of nodes and their associated edges, perform readable layouts, provide navigation and implement social networking capabilities to bring insight into these typically complex and intimidating data structures. Firefly is a Windows Presentation Foundation Application, just like InfoMesa. In fact, Firefly is likely to become part of InfoMesa as a network visualizer in the near future. This is the first post and I'm not quite ready to post the code for general availability, but that's the goal and I think we will be there soon. Firefly will allow someone to point the tool at any database (be it SQL Server, Access, Microsoft Azure Storage [SSDS], or Oracle) and define ...