Fundamentals of Pragmatic Data Visualization

Data Visualization (or DataViz as some people call it) is another of the catch phrases people use when talking about business intelligence. However, do you know what it is all about? What does it mean to visualize data? Why do you want to do it in the first place?

Let's take it down to the basics. In today's technology rich world, we are surrounded by data. To make sense of what is around us, we deal with data every minute. Whether it is the traffic lights while driving or a scatter plot showing the relation between profit and revenue; it is all about data. I talked about that in my earlier post "Data Data Everywhere... But Not a Byte of Information". 

So what is data visualization? Well, I define it as "The practice of showing data in a manner which highlights the message and leads to actionable decisions."

Let's dig deeper and identify the key building blocks or data visualization.