Within the world of Business Intelligence and Analytics, data analysis can only be automated so far and manual analysis is often required to add an important component of human intelligence. To that end, data visualization is a useful, if not critical tool to be able to absorb and understand large amounts of data. So it came as a bit of a surprise that Microsoft’s Live Labs has a research project called “Pivot” intended to help visually analyze data patterns on a Web scale. What intrigues me the most about this project is that, while it is intended to operate at “Web scale” it would appear to be able to scale down to handle any size data set as long as it can be organized into “Collections,” even if the collection represent business data like customers and product orders. While the project is very limited at this time the sample video teases a user interface that is very intuitive for any user comfortable with Web 2.0 technologies.
Has anyone work with this technology yet?