Data Visualization from a Developer’s Perspective Will Robertson Principal Consultant wrobertson@infragistics.com

Warning…

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Will Robertson

• .NET/iOS/Java/Web/?? Developer

• Software & Parallel Architecture

• 10 years in software/IT.

• Technologically Agnostic.

• ….Australian

Questions

• Who are developers/is writing code?

• What types of applications are being developed?

• What is the audience for these applications?

• Who is visualizing data? How?

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What are you talking about?!?

Information Architecture & User

Experience

Software Development

In the beginning…

clarify

construe

deliver

demystify

explicate

elaborate

get across

illuminate

simplify

spell out

depict

demonstrate

clear up

portray

illustrate

in·ter·pret verb \in-ˈtər-prət, -pət\

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Cost

Delivery

Where am I?

• Real Estate

• Time Capture

• Purpose

• Interaction paradigms

• Bandwidth

• Processing

Analysis vs. Actuality

Thinking about it as food.

What can we learn from this?

Calculation vs. Storage

• Need to make a cost comparison

• Various levels of ‘baking’ through pre-calc and storage

• Considerations of Big O

Data Hot Zones

Equipment is important

• Scale for calculations

• Equipment intelligence

• Where is the visualization going to?

• N + 1 scale

Thinking about code.

The evil of occlusion.

• Lose the value of the visualization

• Cannot be avoided

• Can be mitigated

Simple DV code wins

• Proxy objects

• Ordering of data

• Baking visualization data

• Laziness can be a good thing

Removing cost

Enforce relationships

• Create relationships with the world.

• Incorrect relationships create the wrong story.

• Correlation does not imply causation.

• Enforced relationships can reduce calculative complexity.

Credit: Brian Cardarella

Credit: XKCD

Create Understanding

• Give data detail

• Show significance

• Change is important

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Beyond the Visualization

• Informational Context

• High value complimentary information

• Potentially cheap cost of information

Focus Points

• What is my input cost? What is my output cost? (Analysis vs. Actuality)

• How long have I got?

• What is the true cost of visualization?