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.

Data Data Everywhere... But Not a Byte of Information

Someone once said to me that we are generating data from the time we are born. In the life of a person, so much data is generated. Whether it is demographic data or transactional data or analytical data, there is so much of it that we generate every day. Really! You are generating data right now while reading this article. The site has registered you as a visitor... anonymous or recognized, that is upto you really, but the visit is registered into a datastore none-the-less. Depending on which site you visit, there may be information about advertisements and click actions that you perform. Now, I don't want to say that we are all being tracked and this is a conspiracy... it is a fact of life in these times. 

But what happens with this data?