Russell Ackoff was an organizational theorist who pioneered a lot of modern theories in "systems thinking". He was able to classify the content of the human mind into five categories that build upon each other:
- Data - raw symbols; numbers, text, etc.
- Information - processed data to be useful
- usually provides answers to: who, what, where, and when
- Knowledge - applying data and information to answer the "how" of the system
- Understanding - an appreciation of the "why" of the system
- Wisdom - an evaluated understanding of the system
Data visualization is changing. Everyone has analyzed their data over time since the beginning of data analysis. Does this purely temporal approach to data analysis tell the whole story of your data, or does it tell just a narrow perspective? If you could have more insight into your data and analyze it in more than a temporal space, wouldn't your data yield more useful information? A good number of data sets have a geographic component to them that is easily adaptable to a mapping solution. SpatialKey unlocks that aspect of your data and lets you visualize your data over both geography and time.
Modern systems, for the most part, limit the answers of information to who, what, and when. SpatialKey, changes that by providing a new insight into the where aspect of Information via the map. SpatialKey's primary strength is that it allows you to easily visualize large amounts of your data over both space and time while mapping the results and rendering a timeline. This opens new insights and enhances the knowledge derived from the information presented by SpatialKey. This is information that might not be derived from traditionally visualized data sets.
The information unlocked by SpatialKey creates a new knowledge that would not be available otherwise. The knowledge can lead to a new understanding of the trends in the data system, both temporal and spatial. Practically, this means that, for example, instead of seeing sales trends over time, you can now have new visual insight into sales trends over time by a given geographic area.
SpatialKey is the new standard for data visualization. It will help you to unlock new perspectives into you data, like never before. If you would like to experience SpatialKey, you can sign up for the private beta and use SpatialKey for yourself. The private beta is limited to datasets of 10,000 rows, but the actual application can handle datasets of over a million rows.
After you signup for the beta, import your data, or get some sample data from geocommons. Once imported, SpatialKey can geocode your data and get you started with data visualization like you've never seen before.
If you want to learn more about SpatialKey, you can head over to the SpatialKey website.
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