A Visualization of Few Words

Stephen Few's name is started to mentioned in hushed tones, much in the same way that Edward Tufte's name is now evoked. Stephen's website and blog are mandatory reading for those who are interested in visualizations. Few has a wonderful sense of aesthetics, and always seems to ask the hard questions about visualizations.


It was more than interesting to learn that Few had set his sights on Panopticon in a new article that is available from his website.


http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/time_on_the_horizon.pdf


Panopticon hosted Few at their Stockholm headquarters for a few days. This is a fact that Few is up front with at the beginning of his article, thus removing the perceptions of a paid-consultancy-for-favorable-review. Among other things, Few reviewed a visualization that Panopticon came up with called a Horizon Chart.

Few relates the genealogy of his encounter with the Horizon Chart, from initial puzzlement to an appreciation of the visualization. I have to admit that, when the Panopticon guys demoed the Horizon Chart to me, I was similarly befuddled. It seems like it is something of an acquired taste, but as you get more used to it, the visualization of the Horizon Chart becomes more compelling.

The only thing that I would like to see for this particular visualization is the ability to better organize the vertical axis. For example, instead of just listing the 50 stocks vertically, I would like to be able to group the stocks by sector or by supply chain or by trading pairs, so I can quickly compare how one stock did against its peers.

Panopticon is striving for new and interesting ways to do visualizations for the financial industry. They started off with Ben Schneiderman's heatmap, and have started to progress outwards. Heatmaps are becoming more standard in the industry, and I am sure it won't be long before .NET charting vendors start to come out with their own variations of the heatmap theme.

Panopticon needs to continue to push the envelope and come up with compelling visualizations for the capital markets industry. I am anxious to see what fruit is borne out of Stephen Few's consultation.


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

Visualizations Update

Stephen Few is rapidly positioning himself as the guru of business visualizations. His name has been brought to my attention several times over the past few weeks as someone to pay attention to .... "a new Edward Tufte", if you will.

Few has an online library with a lot of free articles to read. Right now, I'm reading Multivariate Analysis using Heatmaps. This is especially worthwhile reading following last week's visit by Richard and Markus of Panopticon, who showed more reasons why we should graduate from the free Microsoft heatmap control to the more feature-laden, doubleplusunfree, Panopticon product. As Panopticon adds more features in the value chain, it will be increasingly difficult to justify using a free product.

------------------------------------

Which brings me to another point that I have been thinking of ... a point that I raised on my previous blog posting. In the field of Enterprise Software, where do the responsibilities of a vendor begin and where do they end?

Take Panopticon, for instance. You can bind a streaming "dataset" to Panopticon, and Panopticon will render a realtime updating Heatmap to visualize that dataset. Of course, you ask how you get data into Panopticon, and you come back with the concept of input adapters.

Then, gradually, you wonder if their input adapters cover KDB, Wombat, Reuters, Vhayu, OpenTick, generic JMS, sockets, etc.

Then you wonder if Panopticon has input adapters that take the output of CEP engines, like Coral8 and Streambase. Or, you have a crazy thought like Panopticon embedding a copy of Esper/NEsper inside of itself.

Then, you get really greedy and wonder if Panopticon provides built-in FIX adapters that will devour a FIX 4.4 stream of orders and executions and show you what exchanges are slow today.

Then you wonder what kinds of analytical tools Panopticon might interface with ... since Panopticon is doing parsing and analysis of the streaming data anyway, can't it just take an extra step and analyze the silly data.

But, then if you are demanding all of these things of Panopticon and Coral8, how do you hook them together? Does the dog wag the tail or does the tail wag the dog?

Or, do we just consider Panopticon a simple visualization tool, demanding nothing more of it then the ability to display brightly colored rectangles of streaming data, and likewise, do we ask nothing more of Coral8 than to do what it does best ... recognize patterns and perform filtering and aggregations.

As Dali-esque as these thoughts may appear, this is the kind of things that I need to consider. In my quest for an ecosystem around the CEP engine, do we ask for the CEP engine vendors to expand outwards, or do we take the outer layer of components (ie: the visualization and analysis tools) and ask them to expand inwards to meet the CEP engine. Whatever it is, my wish would be for a true plug-and-play architecture between the CEP engine, its input components, and its output components.



©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Panopticon Rebuttal

A few weeks ago, I made the comment that we have had some good success with the free Microsoft TreeMap control to implement heatmaps. I also mentioned the fact that, for our needs, the Microsoft product seemed to suffice and that I did not see any immediate reason to buy the Panopticon product for heatmaps.

The Panopticon people asked me for some time on my blog to address the difference between the Treemap and their product, so I have reprinted their comments verbatim:

“What we at Panopticon Software offer in the product called Panopticon Developer is an SDK for embedding visual analysis and monitoring functionality into applications by means of integrating components such as interactive visualizations and a powerful data model capable of aggregating real-time data streams. The Microsoft Treemap control seems in to be considerably smaller and restricted in its API and designed to be used as a simple chart library and therefore for example does not include analytical functionality. Collateral posted at (public url at www.panopticon.com) provides more detailed information on how Panopticon Developer is compares in relation to more traditional chart libraries.

With this SDK we’ve built a rapid web deployment toolkit called Panopticon Enterprise which provides very low ownership costs, extremely short time to market while preserving the functionality available in the SDK.

We typically work out significantly cheaper than in-house build due to the lack of maintenance and ease of deployment for new requirements”

(end of Panopticon comment .. now back to Marc)


Like any company, we have a budget that is tightly controlled. If Panopticon, or any third-party product, provides fiunctionality that will cost us more to develop ourselves, then the decision is to go to a third-party product. We like the fact that a third-party will support the product, but on the other hand, custom developing something ourselves gives us tight control over the feature set without having to wait for release cycles from a vendor. But, if we can take an existing free product and, with relatively little effort, modify it to do what we need, then I would be neglecting my fiduciary responsbility as an officer of the company to purchase a third-party product and pay a continuing stream of license and maintanence fees.

We are only at the beginning of exploring what heatmap technology can do for us, and in addition to Panopticon, there are other fish out there like Fractal Edge (makers of what I like to call the Undulating Amoeba heatmap!)

If there are any of you out there who have used or evaluated heatmap products, I would love to get your comments.



©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved