Buckles' produces meaningful insight by quickly creating connections between data sources and/or analytical results and data visualizations. This page lists Buckles' features, describes the easy steps to visual intelligence, shows screen shots of Buckles in action, and describes how Buckles works.

After learning more about Buckles you may want to watch a Buckles demo and learn how you might buy Buckles.

Buckles Benefits And Features:

Buckles Provides Visual Intelligence In Four Easy Steps

  1. Identify your data source whether it be a database or an analysis tool. Each data plugin represents a data source such as SQL Server®, Oracle®, a Statistica® statistical library, or Web Services. The selection process involves highlighting the source's name and pushing the "Select" button.
  2. Make your data request. The data request may be in the form of a data query or some sort of ad hoc analysis.
  3. Choose the visualizations you wish to be displayed.
  4. Press the "Render" button.

Buckles' Rapidly Joins Data And/Or Analytical Results With Pictures To Produce New Insight:

The simple process that was listed above produced the visualizations shown below.

The user can quickly configure a visualization set, display one or more portraits of the information, and then rapidly reconfigure the tool to  perform the next task. The reconfiguration process takes place using a graphical user interface (GUI) or “wizard”.

The following screen shot is an interactive Buckles visualization of a contrived epidemic data set. The four visualization plugins were created from four different visualization libraries. The epi plot plugin was created from the commercially available Dundas® chart library. The progressive table plugin was created from the SourceGrid open source library. The custom 3D cone tree plugin was built from the OpenGL library. And the interactive ESRI shape file map plugin uses the commercially available ThinkGeo® library. All plugins visualize the epidemic and were chosen and configured using the Buckles configuration Wizard.

Buckles then joined the chosen visualization plugin configurations with an XML representation of the epidemic data to produce the visualization set that is shown below. The data were queried using a Buckles data plugin. In this example, the data plugin operates upon any data that is in the XML format. However, Buckles data acquisition plugins can be created for SQL Server®, Microsoft Excel®, Oracle®, or any other data format or from any data vendor.    

The epidemic visualization shown above is interactive. Highlighting data in any view will cause the corresponding data in other views to be highlighted. The 3D cone tree view can be rotated and zoomed. The map can show geo-position and can highlight geographic regions. In this example, the April bar in the Dundas® epi plot was clicked. This resulted in the infected individuals data being highlighted in the table, the cone tree, and the map.

Concurrent highlighting (or "brushing") can also be accomplished by clicking on data points in the cone tree, the table, or the map.

Buckles’  internal message structure permits brushing, drill downs, and other graphic interactive relationships to be configured by the Wizard.
 
In addition to the plugins shown above, Buckles  can also provide a Wizard configurable plugin for the entire Dundas® chart library. This plugin permits a non-programmer with a Dundas® license to easily configure any Dundas® chart and interactively use Dundas® visualizations alongside other visualization plugins within Buckles.

Immediately following the epidemic visualization, the Buckles user was able to quickly portray real time analyses shown below. In addition to data acquisition plugins, Buckles can operate on data that has been first manipulated and then received from analytical packages. These packages could be custom designed for a special purpose or could be common statistical packages such as Statsoft’s Statistica®.

The examples shown below come from a custom designed statistics plugin and an analysis plugin designed specifically to demonstrate Buckles’ real time visualization capabilities.

The following screen shot shows a simple Students t test performed on two populations of fish length measurements. The visualization portrays the distribution of these populations and the statistical analysis plugin GUI on the left shows the statistical results. 

The fish data were queried from a larger data set stored in an Excel® file. The statistical plugin GUI also contains an Excel® query capability as shown below. Data fields (columns) can be selected by dragging and filters can be chosen using the mouse.

 

In less than a minute, one can then switch to another analysis plugin and perform completely different operations. Below is a visualization of a rule 110 Wolfram one dimensional cellular automaton.

Again, in less than a minute a percolation with a cluster at 60% probability is displayed.

Then, in less than a minute, a Fourier fractal terrain with a spline visualization of the slicer cross section is created.

And then, the Buckles analysis plugin produces a real time complex sine curve (varied by frequency) and a spectral density analysis. The frequency is varied by having the mouse cursor move the knob.

The Buckles wizard-driven configuration of each of the previous displays took less than one minute each. No computer programming was required to move from one analysis and visualization to the next.

Buckles is not a database. Buckles is not a graphical, tabular, or chart tool set. Buckles is a user configurable middleman that performs user interactive marriages between information sources and visualization plugins.

Buckles draws the viewer’s attention to the sense and substance of the information -- instead of set-up issues. The design ideas incorporated into Buckles significantly reduce the cost and time necessary to produce and configure a visualization system for a given task.

Buckles was originally conceived to meet the needs of a scientist’s efforts to portray complex ecological information that wou11 March, 2008e creation of a new visualization tool set. The building of the visualization tools always took longer than the actual Information analysis.

How Does Buckles Work?

The core of the Buckles visualization system is the declarative programming model where everything is pre-defined in XML and the sole purpose of the programming code is to interpret the XML declarations. This paradigm is gaining in popularity. The Buckles declarative model is very close to the Gnome Glade model because this model is very simple to use.

Imagine a simple electrical power strip that has two rows of receptacles. A blue receptacle plugs into any kind of picture or visualization. You can use as many visualization widgets and vendors as you wish. A red receptacle accepts any data or analysis plugin.

Buckles’ job is to quickly connect data and visualization requirements to produce cohesive and interactive pictures for you to explore.

Feel free to contact us at insight [at] freshvista.com