Richard Brath - Graph Analysis and Visualization: Discovering Business Opportunity in Linked Data

Graph Analysis and Visualization: Discovering Business Opportunity in Linked Data

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To Bayla, Abe, and Hana, who provide endless support for all my endeavors.

Richard Brath

To Heather, Micah, Avril, and Naomi for their love and sacrifice in the making of this book. To Chris White for his vision and support in striving to put better tools in the hands of those who need them most.

David Jonker

Richard Brath is actively involved in the research, design, and development of data visualization and visual analytics for both research and commercial applications. His solutions range from rich interactive visualizations for mobile devices to large multi-touch, multi-screen installations, and web-based analytical visualizations for business applications. Braths visualizations are used by hundreds of thousands of people every day in applications as diverse as trading, professional sports, and broadcast television.

David Jonker is a co-founder and Senior Partner of Uncharted (formerly Oculus Info Inc). He is a designer and developer of visual analytics tools and platforms for web-based, distributed, and mobile use. His work over the past two decades includes visualization systems and content for the NASDAQ MarketSite real-time broadcast center in Times Square. He is currently a lead on the DARPA XDATA program. Jonker and Brath are business partners and regular presenters and publishers of work in leading industry and research forums.

Scott Langevin is a director and research scientist at Uncharted, with more than 12 years of industry and academic experience. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of South Carolina, and has a background in machine learning, service-oriented computing, and software engineering. Langevins research interests are in probabilistic graphical modeling, large-scale visual analytics, and adaptive user interfaces.

Peter MacMurchy has been a professional software developer for more than 15 years, focusing on UX, UI, and interactive data-visualization tools. He acquired a keen interest in information visualization from coursework while studying computer graphics for his master of science degree in computer science at the University of Calgary. Since then, hes continued to develop visualization and interactive software for finance, film, energy, and other industries.

This book is about the application of graph visualization and analysis for business. Graph applications are a unique and valuable resource for discovering actionable insights in data. In recent years, analysts inside some of the worlds most innovative companies have been intensively exploring graph-based approaches to a gain deeper understanding of the dynamics of their businesses while discovering opportunities and strategies for improvement.

As the volume, variety, and velocity of available data has grown, so has the need for techniques and technology to make sense of it all. Organizations have become acutely aware of the limitations of simple dashboard-style charts. Dashboards are good at showing metrics and trends. They can inform you when areas of business are underperforming or outperforming others, but they cannot begin to tell you why, and understanding why is key to taking effective action.

The function of a graph is to represent links between things, revealing the structure and nature of relationships in data. Relationships are fundamental to the why and the how of things, which is one of the reasons graph analysis and visualization has so much potential for value.

Looking back on 20 years of our personal history designing and building new applications for business and intelligence analysts, the authors realize that graphs have played a role in many of those solutions. Today, several of our most significant research and software development efforts are, in essence, graph-based.

Despite the utility of graphs, however, little has been published about the application of graphs outside of the world of science, and even less has been published about graph design. With recent advancements in the capabilities of open source graph tools and libraries, graphs have become accessible to every business analyst, but access to knowledge of effective principles and techniques for graph analysis and visualization remains relatively limited. Our hope in writing this book is to help change that.