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Visual Attribute Explorer
A tool that provides rapid data analysis through attribute bar charts and parallel coordinate plots.
Date Posted: March 22, 2000
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Update: October 7, 2003
Version 0.4: Added support for ODBC/JDBC data sources, saving and loading of analyses, and the provision of command line options.
What is Visual Attribute Explorer?
Visual Attribute Explorer is a tool that provides rapid data analysis through attribute bar charts and parallel coordinate plots, allowing exploration of the influence of applied constraints and immediate assessment of the results. Visual Attribute Explorer allows for interactive discovery of the nature of the data and the relationships between fields within that data. This tool is intended to complement IBM's DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data or to run as a standalone tool.
How does it work?
Through the bar chart view, attribute constraints may be applied, and the influence of those constraints on other attributes may be assessed immediately. The new parallel coordinate plot view allows further detailed analysis, including both the identification of statistical distributions and the auto-normalisation of axes to assist with relationship exposure.
An article describing the benefits of attribute exploration can be found on the developerWorks Web site.
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| | About the technology author(s):
The Ease of Use Department in Warwick forms part of a wider team reporting to Tony Temple, Vice President of Ease of Use. You can read more about Ease of Use initiatives within IBM at www.ibm.com/easy. Part of the function of the Warwick department is to prototype solutions that have the potential to improve the ease-of-use characteristics of existing or embryonic products. Visual Attribute Explorer comes under that category.
 Andy Smith joined IBM in 1977 as an operator working with the Call 360 timeshare service. After five years as an operator, systems programmer, and product support analyst, he moved to Warwick to join the Application System International Centre. This centre was responsiple for the development and support of Application System, a mainframe business intelligence product. Mr. Smith worked on a complementary PC product called Personal AS, later renamed to Visualizer; specifically, he worked on business graphics before becoming one of the overall product architects. When this function was moved to Santa Teresa Lab in 1994, Mr. Smith remained in Warwick in what has evolved into the Ease of Use department. He produced the Data Selector JavaBeans, which first appeared on alphaBeans and were then incorporated into VisualAge for Java 3.0. Mr. Smith can be contacted at hci@uk.ibm.com.
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 Simon Moore joined IBM in 1986 as a software developer, working on the Personal AS product at the Application System International Centre in Warwick, England. During the next eight years he worked on the development of various pieces of business intelligence related software and specialized in user interface development. In 1994, one of these products moved to the Santa Teresa laboratory in California, and Mr. Moore went with it on a three-year assignment. During this time, he worked on the development of various products related to IBM's DB2 relational database, including Visualizer, Intelligent Decision Server, and DB2 OLAP server. In 1998, Mr. Moore returned to the UK, and he now works in the Ease of Use department. Mr. Moore can be contacted at hci@uk.ibm.com.
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 Ryan Bennitt is a student at the University of Warwick on a four-year masters degree program, studying computer systems engineering. After achieving the highest mark for the year for his second-year group software project, he went on to the attend the finals of the IBM Thinkpad Challenge 2000 at Hursley. In the summer of 2001, between his third and fourth years at University, Mr. Bennitt worked for IBM at the Ease of Use department in Warwick. He developed an extension to the Visual Attribute Explorer using parallel coordinate plots and added support for help pages using JavaHelpTM. Mr. Bennitt can be contacted at R.D.Bennitt@warwick.ac.uk.
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