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Data Mining Goes 3D

Posted by michael on from the patterns-of-change dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "At Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), a data mining and visualization software suite developed in the last two years is now able to extract information from many sources of data and to return 3D images as results. In Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images, the New Mexico Business Weekly reports that Sandia's Information Visualization Lab is able to search structured documents, such as scientific journals, or unstructured ones, such as the Web or an intranet. Since the lab has been established five months ago, this software has already been used to determine the potential of several partnerships with SNL. Other firms, such as Lockheed Martin, also are starting to use the lab. Let's hope that SNL releases this software as open source. It should be fun to use it. For more details and pictures, please read this overview."

79 comments

  1. 3D images? by Dorothy+86 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I think they should report it as music!! (if you don't get the reference, it's from Dirk Gentlty's Holistic Decective Agency by Douglas Adams)

    --
    Game Overdrive - Gaming News
  2. Data? All mine! by Hot+Summer+Nights · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Mine, mine alone.

    --
    Karma: Terrible - and proud of it!
  3. Oh god! They've discovered... by lxt · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...Excel and PowerPoint! The nightmare has been unleashed!

    "In Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images," ...ie, really dodgy pie charts and bar graphs!

    1. Re:Oh god! They've discovered... by DeepDarkSky · · Score: 1

      Did you RTFA? When was the last time you saw Powerpoint and Excel do true 3D visualization?

    2. Re:Oh god! They've discovered... by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      the article is real shallow on anything else except hype, so it's kinda hard to say anything else than "ooo it's coooooooooooooool, true 3d!".

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    3. Re:Oh god! They've discovered... by LostCluster · · Score: 2, Funny

      Let's just hope they don't stumble into Microsoft Access next....

    4. Re:Oh god! They've discovered... by Otter · · Score: 1
      When was the last time you saw Powerpoint and Excel do true 3D visualization?

      PowerPoint doesn't, but Excel certainly has true 3D, at least as the term is normally used in computer usage. The Sandia stuff seems to be different in that it does higher dimensional representation.

      --
      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
    5. Re:Oh god! They've discovered... by DeepDarkSky · · Score: 1

      I could barely grant you that Excel does true 3D visualization...but yes, Excel's 3D graphs and charts aren't too bad. For simple data situations, it suffices.

    6. Re:Oh god! They've discovered... by timts · · Score: 1, Informative

      yeah, since excel has the really not so ahead of the game in charting, there are numerous tools to visualize data to 3D image, tons of them.
      I am in the data mining field, so I really dont seem anything as "new" tech here.

  4. Sounds fun by Vrejakti · · Score: 1

    But maybe not as fun as DOOM for System admin job. Still seems it may have the same effect of making a rather boring job more interesting.

    --
    Dollar Highway Financial News
  5. 3-d data mining.... by drfrog · · Score: 5, Informative

    is over 5 years old already

    google search

    people have been doing real time data mining in VRML since the vrml2.0 plugins came out back in 97

    --
    back in the day we didnt have no old school
  6. HollywoodOS by Xpilot · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just think, if Hollywood bothers to at least try and get some technical stuff even remotely realistic (and look cool), they could incorporate such things into movies. But no... we get a fusion reaction which you can control with metal tentacles (just push the little flames back in!).

    --
    "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
  7. Jokes that have to be explained... by Bad+Move · · Score: 0, Insightful

    ... suck.

    1. Re:Jokes that have to be explained... by mo^ · · Score: 1

      i got it..... maybe its the folks need explaining to that suck

      --
      bah!*@%!
  8. SNL by toetagger1 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Either this is old news, or the preview of the next true SNL sketch. You tell me! (for those not watching US TV: SNL==Saturday Night Live)

    --
    who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
  9. How much? by DAldredge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How much will the license this for? I know the taxpayers paid for it, but it always seams like it gets exclusivly licensed to some company for next to nothing then that company charges the people that paid for it in the first place a lot of money to use it.

    1. Re:How much? by TruenoSuave · · Score: 1

      Just because Sandia is primarily funded by the United States government, does not impart that this particular project is. The private sector also has a significant interest in Sandia, especially Lockheed-Martin.

      So save what "you know" for what you really know.

    2. Re:How much? by orthogonal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images

      I know the taxpayers paid for it, but it always seams like it gets exclusivly [sic] licensed to some company for next to nothing then that company charges the people that paid for it in the first place a lot of money to use it.

      You're a wisely cynical man.

      In the light of the 9/11 Commission's report of the multiple failures of the CIA and FBI that allowed the terrorists to attack us in 2001, in the light of Sibel Edmonds's allegations that the FBI intentionally destroyed translations of intercepted terrorist conversations, in light of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report about systemic CIA failures to provide accurate intelligence about WMDs in Iraq, why am I less than thrilled to discover that Sandia National Laboratories' businesses?

      When I further learn that "Sandia officials say tech firms or venture capitalists can use the lab on a per-request basis," I begin to understand that Sandia's Corporate Business Development and Partnerships aren't using my tax dollars to protect me, they're providing corporate welfare by dong the Research and Development that business wants but doesn't want to pay for.

      Remember, these are the same businesses that vociferously object to government programs that might compete with them, whether that's sponsorship of Open Source Software or rural electric cooperatives or IRS software that might be efficient enough to cost H&R Block. These are the same corporations that got a provision added to the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill to prevent the government from getting discounts by buying those drugs in bulk, but which profit from research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

      These are the same corporations that want Ashcroft's Department of Justice to stop worrying so much about fixing the FBI's failures, so it can spend government time -- and your money -- prosecuting civil -- civil, not criminal -- suits against file traders under the PIRATE Act on behalf of those corporations. If you need to sue a corporation, you're on your own; maybe you'll get some coupons out of a class action suit. But if the corporation wants to sue you, they get the assistance of top government lawyers and FBI agents packing guns and warrants.

      And this just after the U.S. House passed the biggest corporate tax cuts in twenty years, because existing direct subsidies -- or less politely, corporate welfare -- will no longer be permitted under World Trade Organization rules. Even House Republicans admit this tax cut "is riddled with special-interest provisions that would further complicate the tax code, send jobs overseas and worsen a federal deficit already at record highs."

      Does anyone really expect Sandia's going to release the source code to the data mining software to us, the citizens who have to pay for it?

      Be proud, Americans, of how fat your labor makes your corporate masters! What a joy it is to serve them! It is your privilege to work long hours and pay high taxes so your masters can buy their yachts -- and buy the laws that enslave you.

      America, Of the People, By the People, for the Pe^H^H Corporations

      --
      Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
    3. Re:How much? by DAldredge · · Score: 1

      Of course they have interest. They get top of the line R&D for next to no risk and next to no cost. These labs cost a lot of money to run and they amount they get from private business doesn't come near the amount required to keep them open.

      It's the same thing in regards to medical research, FEDGOV spends a lot on research and then licenses the results for cents on the dollar to a private company who then profits at the expense of the tax payer.

      If these companies want to do R&D and have full rights to it, they are free to do it themselves. However if they wish to use FEDGOV labs to do it, then perhaps they should not have exclusive rights to the tech.

    4. Re:How much? by Jim_Maryland · · Score: 1
      I actually do R&D work for LMCO (not related to this particular project) but my work is completely internal R&D. My understanding of the IP ownership depends on the development details:

      If done at contractor site, under contractor funding, for possible contract win, contractor retains IP rights

      If done at contractor site, under government funding, IP may or may not be owned by contractor depending on contract details

      If done at government site by contractor, under government funding or joint government/contractor funding, generally IP is retained by government but agreement can be made to transfer to contractor

      If using government equipment, it seems that the government will retain IP (NOTE: government equipment may only be used for official government directed work so this is typically contract R&D).

      Now I haven't actually had to deal with the above personally but one of the more senior co-workers explained it to me a while back so I hope I have it correct. If I have any of it wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me.

      Jim

    5. Re:How much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How much will the license this for? I know the taxpayers paid for it, but it always seams like it gets exclusivly licensed to some company for next to nothing then that company charges the people that paid for it in the first place a lot of money to use it.

      I work here so I know and am posting AC.

      Sandia is what is known as GOCO - Government Owned, Contractor Operated.

      In the same way, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore are GOCO (except those two laboratories, at least for now, are operated by the University of California instead of Lockmart.)

      At Sandia there is an internal organization that tries to promote commercialization and it does indeed have the ability to grant exclusive license to companies for technology developed at the laboratories.

      However.

      There is a provision like this

      Under the terms of Contract XX-XXX-123456, there is a non-exclusive license for use of this work by or on behalf of the U.S. Government.
      which prevents the private company from ripping the taxpayers for a product that the government helped develop.

      The company, however, typically has the freedom to sell the product exclusively in various private sector marketplaces that they negotiate for and for which they compensate the labs.

      A while back the idea was that if money came back into the laboratories in this way that it would help offset the costs of developing various technologies and thereby decrease the net cost of the laboratories to the taxpayer.

      Even so, various specialized works from Sandia and other laboratories without a large commercial market but nevertheless useful have found there way out under the GPL.

    6. Re:How much? by volve · · Score: 1

      You know, occasionally, just occasionally I feel there should be a +6 that's only attainable from some obscenely large score past +5, just to memorably mark such insightful posts...

      Anyway, thanks for the post orthogonal, it is truly deserved of the moniker "insightful".

      -VolVE

    7. Re:How much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Does anyone really expect Sandia's going to release the source code to the data mining software to us, the citizens who have to pay for it?

      Geez, no kidding. The least the government could do is hand over the keys to a stealth bomber since I helped pay for it.

      What I'd really like though is for the government to give me an old person. Seriously, I mean I am paying for social security, aren't I?

      I'm with you man! Let's unite!

    8. Re:How much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Be proud, Americans, of how fat your labor makes your corporate masters! What a joy it is to serve them! It is your privilege to work long hours and pay high taxes so your masters can buy their yachts -- and buy the laws that enslave you.

      Uncle Mao? Is that you?

  10. I ran some projections by teamhasnoi · · Score: 0, Troll

    of free speech, patent laws, corporate malfeasance and civil rights and came up with this image

  11. A story about visualization software... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    without a picture to look at. That's like e-mailing a friend about the prettiest woman in the world and forgetting to attach a .JPG.

  12. More important than the capability... by DeepDarkSky · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is having the knowledge, experience, and creative talent to know how to use the capability to design meaningful and easy to understand data visualization. Anybody can be an Excel monkey and drag and drop charts and graphs, but it doesn't mean they'd make sense. Leaping to 3D is not a panacea for data mining visualization, but the potential is certainly there.

  13. OSS can't be everything... by LostCluster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Come on.... Let's hope that SNL releases this software as open source.

    Wouldn't the work of a government-funded national lab be public domain if it ever were to be released?

    As great as OSS is, the only truely free license with absoultely no restrictions is public domain, and that's what works of the government usually become.

    1. Re:OSS can't be everything... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why is that right? If the public paid for it, it's public property, and it should not be allowed to be stolen. The CEO of some company may pay more taxes than me, but that doesn't mean he has a right to take government created code (i.e. funded by me), make small improvements, and charge me for it!

      The government is here to serve the people, but that doesn't mean just a few people, it means all people equally.

    2. Re:OSS can't be everything... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The CEO of some company may pay more taxes than me, but that doesn't mean he has a right to take government created code (i.e. funded by me), make small improvements, and charge me for it!

      Yes, he should have that right. And so should you, and so should every other citizen.

    3. Re:OSS can't be everything... by wintermute42 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wouldn't the work of a government-funded national lab be public domain if it ever were to be released?

      As far as I know the Department of Energy labs, which include the Sandia labs, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, are all managed by contractors. The contractor does work for the government, but frequently maintains co-ownership with the government for the work performed.

      I have worked with commercial contractors that worked under similar arragements. The customer paid the contractor for software development work, but the contractor also owned a copy, which tbey could sell to others. Only work that was explicitly identified as proprietary was exempted from this. Some consulting companies, like Wind River, in its early days, have built a significant amount of intellectual property following this model. Once they build up a software base they have a competitive advantage in licensing it for new applications. The fact that some software can be provided "off the shelf" rather than developed provides an incentive for the prospective customer to agree to co-ownership.

      The organizations that manage the national labs seem to take a similar approach. They also own much of the intellectual information they develop. Release of software into the public domain at the University of California managed labs requires a review by a UC office that is in charge of licensing.

  14. Light on details... by TheQuestion · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wish this story went into more details into the algorithms used. Saying stuff like "we take tons of data and out comes a 3D image" is great, but what does the 3D image actually represent? What are the dimensions being graphed?

    My company manages a very large portfolio of auto loans. I'd like to know more details as to what they are actually doing so that I can judge whether we can use this technology or one like it to predict trends in our consumer base, or to develop better scoring models.

    1. Re:Light on details... by Coryoth · · Score: 4, Informative

      I wish this story went into more details into the algorithms used. Saying stuff like "we take tons of data and out comes a 3D image" is great, but what does the 3D image actually represent? What are the dimensions being graphed?

      If I had to guess I would guess that they are doing 3D Self Organizing Maps, or something very similar.

      The principle is: create a huge feature space for the documents in question (something like word counts for each document for each word in the corpus, with appropriate fixes (drop the most and least common words, do stemming etc.). You can now "visualize" the documents in a massive 20,000 dimensional space. However, what you can do, is try to create a projection from 20,000 dimensions down to 2 or 3 dimensions in a way that best preserves distances in the 20,000 dimensional space. This automatically creates a clustering of the documents as well, and you now have something that you can visualize practically. If you start doing things like labelling clusters and subsclusters by the words unique to/defining that cluster you can start to make some sense of the visualisation.

      Effectively this is just a means of doing clustering on a large document space in such a way that the final output can be visualized (instead of the sort of results you get from k-means, or heirarchical clustering, which are a lot harder to visualize in a meaningful way for laymen). The benefit of being able to visualize it in that sense is that you can "see" patterns of other document attributes by adding that to the visualization (via colors, labels, etc.) and see a global overview of those attributes across the entire document space.

      Just to reiterate: I do not know that this is what is being done, and they don't say a lot in the article, but I do have some experience in this field, and what I gleaned from the article would tend to imply an approach like this.

      Jedidiah.

      --
      Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    2. Re:Light on details... by rbpjenkins · · Score: 1

      Hi

      I should declare my hand up front and let you know I'm a co-founder of Purple Insight, the company that is referred to in another comment about this article:

      http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1141 24 &threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=134&tid=137&tid=198 &mode=thread&pid=9668022#9671027

      I'll avoid making this a commercial and talk about the techniques you ask about at a generic level. It might not surprise you to know that our product MineSet provides these techniques and more. Please browse www.purpleinsight.com for details. If you would like me to contact you directly I can point you to some material outlining an approach to credit risk analysis that includes visual data mining.

      In general the type of techniques applicable to the issue you describe are:

      - Visualisation of the data you have for example plotting customer home location against promtness of payment against size of loan with other attributes such as income or age represented by size, colour or shape of the point plotted. This type of plot can be animated over time or age or any other useful attribute. This will help you get an impression of trends and outliers that might warrant further investigation. Ideally your visualisation system will be powerful enough to allow this proces to be interactive for large data sets and include intuitive filtering, selection and drill down features

      - Clustering of the data into groups of similar data. If your tool allows you to determine the most important attributes driving position in a given cluster one can then visualize those attributes against each other with each colour a different colour. This again allows identification of outliers and anomolies (excellent for fraud detection) and also observations such as 'people of age $XX'

      - If there is a target variable that is of interest, such as default on paymebnt, and a predictive model would be helpful, Decision Tree and Evidence classifiers are extremely powerful for doing so (and the corresponding visualizations make it easy to identify the causal relationships in such a model).

      Regards
      Rob

  15. Your taxes at work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    The first application is to help companies study patents. Okay, so one division of the Feds is helping people create more work for another division that is already abused and sorely overtaxed?

    Maybe Sandia should just go back to researching cooler ways for our species to commit suicide.

  16. for the trees by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Funny

    The technology is called "ClearForest", in homage to the continents of forests cleared for paper printouts of these 3D reports that PHBs will have shredded once they've "read" them.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  17. ok let's move to piquepaille blog by clarkie.mg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow almost every story from Roland Piquepaille is selected into slashdot.

    --
    Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
    1. Re:ok let's move to piquepaille blog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yea, I believe he must be bumping uglies' with the editor[s]...

  18. MacSpin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    MacSpin was a 3-d data mining tool that is over 16 years old now.

    1. Re:MacSpin by drfrog · · Score: 1

      hahah, cool

      do the posters & moderators on here even check their facts before posting?

      --
      back in the day we didnt have no old school
  19. paper? by cyklo · · Score: 2, Funny

    for 3D, they're going to have to carve them out of entire trunks. imagine the shredders you'd have to use...

  20. 3D data visualization by Coryoth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Anyone interested in doing powerful 3D data visualization should make a mandatory stop here. It's an open source visualization toolkit written in C++, but with bindings for Java and Python as well. This is a very powerful and very impressive system, and ought to be rated as one of the great open source projects. It doesn't seem to get much attention - I'm not sure why.

    Have a look, and look at what it is actually capable of doing. If you want to do any sort of 3D visualization, it really is worth your time to learn a bit about VTK.

    Jedidiah.

    --
    Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    1. Re:3D data visualization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For those interested in more visualization techniques, I have a web page at Tauceti with plenty of examples and links.

      Nick

    2. Re:3D data visualization by jefu · · Score: 1
      Opendx (http://www.opendx.org) is another open source data visualization tool that is well worth looking at. It uses a dataflow kind of programming language with a large number of primitives and while the learning curve to do advanced things is pretty steep, doing easy stuff is, well, easy.

      It was originally an IBM product but is now open source. Thanks to IBM are do again.

    3. Re:3D data visualization by Coryoth · · Score: 1

      Yes. I've spent time with OpenDX. It is good but (1) the interface is on the archaic side, and (2) yeah, there is a lot of learning involved. (3) The quality of the resulting visualisations, in terms of their interactivity was a little limited (though perhaps I simply failed to learn how to do that part).

      The idea is very nice - you simply connect together a bunch of boxes with inputs and outputs and construct a visualisation that way. It means you can do so in an entirely graphical manner, and get a good overview of what exactly you are doing.

      VTK actually uses a similar scheme, with a render pipline, but rather than a graphical tool you use Java or C++ or Python to connect the elements (provided as objects) together. VTK does have a much larger range of objects to put in your render pipeline, providing extremely rich functionality.

      So, I'm not really trying to dis OpenDX, it is a great tool, but I really do think VTK is a better option.

      Jedidiah.

      --
      Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    4. Re:3D data visualization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you take a look at ParaView, a project built on top of VTK by Kitware, you might notice that Kitware is funded by ASCI. And what is ASCI? It is a cooperative program spread across Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos National Labs. The labs do indeed fund a good bit of open-source software.

  21. Like the movie Hax0rs.... by jcb_uf · · Score: 1

    So now data-mining will look like a cross between a game of "You Don't Know Jack!" and "Lawnmower Man". Hollywood just may be right.

  22. What engine do they use? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cube or Quake? I've always thought the various so-called "3D Desktop" projects should handle the information on a harddrive like this...use something like quake levels, some based on the age of the data, some based on affinity issues...oh yeah, don't forget your BFG!

  23. Silicon Graphics MineSet by marmite · · Score: 2, Informative

    SGI had a product called "MineSet" which did this kind of stuff, only a long long time ago. Originally it was inspired by the 3D filemanager SGI did for Jurassic Park. Cool idea, but old hat :).

    --ralpht

    --
    I do not represent myself.
    1. Re:Silicon Graphics MineSet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      now owned by a company called purpleinsight

      I did quite a bit of work with this product, and 3D could be used to great effect analysing large amounts of data.

      Would like to see what new products are available. I don't get this from the snl papers.

      Saragene is well worth exploration. To my mind this visualisation really added something that would be difficult to see any other way.
      http://www.sara.nl/projects/projects_07_03_e ng.htm l

  24. This is UNIX by sharkey · · Score: 1

    I know this.

    --

    --
    "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
  25. holy crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    talk about a non-story...

  26. No surprise that Lockheed uses Sandia work by wintermute42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Other firms, such as Lockheed Martin, also are starting to use the lab.

    I don't find it surprising that Lockheed Martin is one of the firms "starting to use the lab". Lockheed Martin runs Sandia as a contractor for the Department of Energy. Lockheed has a builtin bias to show how applicable the work at Sandia is.

    1. Re:No surprise that Lockheed uses Sandia work by Letylyf · · Score: 1

      Heh, of course not. Wicked cool that Sandia has been slashdotted though, I used to intern there.

  27. Didn't Roland the Plogger post this already? by Animats · · Score: 1

    Didn't we see this article before?

  28. Who will use this? by TheMeddler · · Score: 1

    Neat toy, but who is the audience? How do you begin to meaningfully interpret 3-D data? One of the fundamentals of effective communication is to know your audience - I imagine that most people able to pay for 3D data mining (i.e. business executives) aren't going to be able to make heads or tails of this sort of presentation. Visualizing spatial relations require creative abilities, something I don't see much in the typical business manager.

    --
    90% Professional Slacker
    1. Re:Who will use this? by tehcyder · · Score: 1
      I know that on /. everyone at work who is not a programmer is a PHB, and therefore stupid, dull, unimaginative and uninteresting, but this sort of comment is simply ridiculous.

      Presenting information in a 3-D format can really help busy business people see the wood (forest for Americans) from the trees.

      You need to spend far less time and thought (and creativity, if you like) in understanding a 3-D chart than a buch of spreadsheets showing the raw data. This is a fact of life in the real business world.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    2. Re:Who will use this? by TheMeddler · · Score: 1

      "You need to spend far less time and thought (and creativity, if you like) in understanding a 3-D chart than a buch of spreadsheets showing the raw data. This is a fact of life in the real business world. " I disagree.

      --
      90% Professional Slacker
  29. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why? If it's public property, why should any individual have the right to decide on its own what to do with it (i.e. transform it into private property)? It well could be controlled through a public process, like GPLed code does.

  30. Data mining is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem is aviabilitz of the soft, cost., and no warez yet... Mybe in 3D it will be more popular and aviable to the general public...

  31. This is so 90s by Don+Tobin · · Score: 2, Informative

    I feel like I'm playing Civilization and my agent is reporting that another civilization has just invented something my people have had for the last hour.

    Seriously, I was doing this at the Census Bureau years ago with VRML and enhanced it with those dodgy Performance Copilot (SGI) type tools. Since then products such as, oh, I don't know, Cognos and Crystal Reports (4+) have implemented 3d data set controls and reports in spades(Tivoli Business Decision Manager anyone?).

    Open source tends to lack the robust (read: overcomplicated buggy) features of the commercial variants but the underlying technology is still mesozoic for us terrans. And yeah, many MBA dinosaurs lack the ability to visualize data like this (compare business typical fiugures to an economist's throughput figures and the economist has no trouble understanding this stuff, odd how they make so little when they show off that title). Still, there are countless open minded business ppl with econ backgrounds who love these kinds of tools. Not to mention the courses being offered for the past decade in the mindset of 3d management.

    Nachos for all, but not all the nachos.

  32. ObSimpsons by generationxyu · · Score: 2, Funny

    And turning to the 3D graph, we see an inmistakeable cone of ignorance.

    --
    I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
  33. Data Mining *WENT* 3D... by dwater · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... along time ago. Purple|Insight

    Some nice screen shots there too :)

    Mineset detail
    Network Analysis
    Intrusion Detection
    Fraud Detection

    --
    Max.
  34. Oh yeah? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Try this : Advanced Visualization Systems

  35. Open Source Data Visualisation based on IBM code by trillion · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have been tinkering with this since I came across it last year sometime. But it too is nothing new; first release was in 1998

    http://www.opendx.org

  36. data mining vs visualization by tommeke100 · · Score: 0

    the company does visualization. It doesn't state anything about datamining itself. Everybody does clustering really. Just giving it a 3-D aspect where the height is probability or something like that isn't really that high tech

  37. *yawn* by Niet3sche · · Score: 1

    Oooh, so we can "now" show datamining results in 3d. Wait, we've been doing this with Cubes and Caves for years now (have you recently seen hydrologists getting a full idea from a 2d map? Nope, they pump the data through a viz tool [matlab would be one] and can throw it up on the walls of a "cave", or a "C-6", as we call our implimentation here). This is not news.

  38. This is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...getting old.

  39. Holy cow... by waldorf+statler · · Score: 1

    You really need to stop getting all your news from Nova, 60 Minutes, Dateline, and Michael Moore's diary... Contrary to popular belief: 1. "The Man" doesn't really exist and if he did, he probably wouldn't be hell-bent on "keeping you down". 2. Satan does not fund big-businesses. 3. Big-businesses do not fund Satan. 4. Intelligence did not fail. Please, please, pleeaase do your homework on the 9/11 commission and the actual "failures" of the intelligence community before you make sweeping judgments like that. 5. Trickle-down economics has been proven to WORK! Business benefits, investors benefit, consumers benefit, communities benefit, and the economy benefits -- probably why we have an unemployment rate lower than Clinton's average, a record home-buying market, and no inflation even though we took a huge hit on a major financial hub 3 years ago. Is the alternative you suggest to spend more on welfare? How many of those groups I mentioned above really benefit in the longrun from welfare packages? Take off your tinfoil hat and step into the light.

    1. Re:Holy cow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I say to you, as you say to the root,
      You realy should stop getting all your news from
      Fox and WST. References please?

      1 the man does exist. the man is everyone. the man is primarily anyone with more power/money than you.

      2 and 3 refer to a meme. could you be more specific please.

      4 Intelligence always fails. You see according to
      the gops & dems intelligence is not an exact science. So failure is part of it.

      5 This one is just bullshit. Works like communism does. Great on paper.

      Take off your blinkers and try to think for yourseld.

  40. Paranoia is not an attractive trait by waldorf+statler · · Score: 1
    Regarding "The Man":
    Paranoia is really not becoming of anyone and it's dangerous to your health as the constant looking behind your shoulder can cause whiplash. Take a deep breath, calm down, and put that brain to work. Proverbially speaking, money corrupts. Does that mean that everyone with an extra penny is a little bit more likely to kick you in the teeth for spite? To me, it means that the wealthy philanthropists are less attractive to the media than the wealthy misantrhopes.

    Regarding intelligence failures:
    Off the top of your head, tell me how many intelligence successes occur annually? No, don't go looking to the media (not even FoxNews...). No, don't even ask Congress.

    Can't think of many, right?

    By unofficial definition a true "intelligence success" will never be public knowledge. We, as the general public, have no idea of the staggeringly high number of times intelligence has saved our lives. Ironically, we know all too well a sickening amount of detail from such clusterf$%@s that led to 9/11, the U.S.S Cole bombing, etc.

    If we had any clue as to how many "intelligence successes" have saved us from destruction/distress we would probably be scared to get out of bed. We should all be thankful that people are out there working to make sure we don't have to hide under the covers quaking in fear.

    You wanted some sources? OK:

    • Bureau of Labor and Statistics lists plenty of information on employment/unemployment. Take a look at the historical unemployment rates and whip out a calculator. For '92 to '00 I calculate unemployment to an average of 6.1% -- Nothing wrong with that. That's a very healthy unemployment rate and I couldn't complain, but when you compare that with the current rate quoted at 5.6%, a lot of complaints about the current administration's unemployment rate lose their ability to hold water.

    • I see 214,000 jobs added last month. That's bad?

    • As for the economic theory, I am a firm believer in Keynesian economics as well as the ideas of John Hicks.

    • Bankrate.com has some great information and graphical representations of historical rates and economic indicators. Take a look and let me know how you feel about the current indicators?

    • If you want a look at how other people are thanklessly putting their lives on the line for my safety and yours, and hence why they command my utmost respect and gratitude to the extent that I refuse to acknowledge intelligence failures, read Book Of Honor by Ted Gup.

    Sorry, no references to anything on the Washington Times, FoxNews, the Washington Post, PBS.org, antiwar.com, or thenation.com. Call me crazy, but I like my data unbiased.

    That's all for now.

  41. I'm outraged by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    When I further learn that "Sandia officials say tech firms or venture capitalists can use the lab on a per-request basis," I begin to understand that Sandia's Corporate Business Development and Partnerships aren't using my tax dollars to protect me, they're providing corporate welfare by dong the Research and Development that business wants but doesn't want to pay for.

    OMG, you'd think we lived in a capitalist society or something.

    Round up all the workers. We'll beat those fatcats down with our hammers and mow them down with our sickles.