Tomorrow’s data sharing world: Infographics and beyond

At its core, data visualization is a simple concept – it involves taking data and presenting it in a graphical format, either in the form of something like a picture or a graph or a Infographic or a combination of all these techniques and more.

It’s an idea that has been around since the 17th century and one that has big implications for marketers in particular.

With the right data visualization tools at your side, marketers are able to accomplish things like:

But data visualization is about a lot more than just taking a set of numbers and turning it into an image. It’s about taking concepts and ideas – some of which are incredibly complicated and sophisticated – and presenting them in a way that nearly everyone can understand.

It’s also the direction that nearly every industry is headed in, extending well beyond the world of marketing and into just about every part of our lives that you can think of.

One of the most interesting (and essential) was that data visualization is already being applied in the real world has to do with our infrastructure. The Office of Cyber Infrastructure Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, for example, is already in the process of developing computer modeling and data visualization tools in an effort to better understand not only how the various elements of the country’s infrastructure operates, but how they all come together to form a cohesive whole, the properties that those connections are built on and what happens in the event that they fail.

To that end, OCIA regularly uses data gathered from a variety of different sources to anticipate what various “malicious and non-malicious” events (meaning everything from a terrorist attack to a hurricane) would do and what actionable steps can be taken today to mitigate tomorrow’s damage.

Over the last few years, OCIA has been creating a data visualization infrastructure model based on public data about an area of northern New Jersey, taking a close look at the current state of the area’s water system.

Once that data was visualized and officials could see not only how the individual systems were connected and how they all depended on one another and in what ways, they instantly got a very clear indication of the types of disruptions they just were not prepared for.

This in turn led to a number of immediate changes to improve these systems, none of which would have been possible without data visualization and data sharing.