InetSoft BI Webcast: Visualization and Data Mashups

In May 2017, InetSoft's Product Manager Byron Igoe participated in Information Management’s DM Radio Webcast, “The Last Mile: Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up.” The following is a transcript of that Webcast, which was hosted by Eric Kavanagh and included BI consultants William Laurent and Malcolm Chisholm.

Eric Kavanagh (EK): Welcome to DM Radio. My name is Eric Kavanagh, and I will be your humble if excitable host for the show that is designed to peel away the marketing veneer so we can get down to brass tacks and hopefully figure out what is going on here in the field of information management. And obviously there is plenty going on. It is the Information Age.

And the topic for today is really interesting stuff. We’re talking about mashups. We’re going to find out what a mashup is all about. We had a little chat before the show, and there was some bantering going back and forth about a Business Week article back in 2007, perhaps, that said this is the year of the mashup, and well, it really wasn’t. But it’s not the first time the press has been a bit ahead of the game.

But we’re going to find out from several experts what is going on in the field of data visualization and how mashups can really help you get a strategic view of enterprise data. So several great guests on today’s show, goodness gracious. We have several great guests. We have a couple expert guest hosts who are going to help us out today: William Laurent of William Laurent Advisors and Malcolm Chisholm of Ask Get, are in our New York studio, and then we’re going to hear from Byron Igoe of InetSoft. So we’re going to hear the consultant perspective and the vendor perspective, and of course, we’ll have our exciting roundtable discussion.

Now without further ado, I’d like to bring in our expert guest host number one William Laurent. Welcome to DM Radio. So let’s talk about what a mashup is. You’ve written about some of this stuff. I’ve written about some of this stuff. A lot of people think mashups, and they think Google maps the way it overlays business names on a map, and that is a mashup, but it is just one kind, right?

William Laurent (WL): Yes, right. For me the key driver of mashup is a common context. You had mentioned Google maps. One thing you’re going to see a lot more in the future is medial collaboration with medical imaging or with the medical image of the human body being the common shared context doctors can put diagnosis on top of that collaborate with each other. If you look at another really cool mashup, is what Salesforce.com has done with utilizing Google and Yahoo maps so again, with the geographic perspective being the common and shared context. So that’s key for me, the shared context.

Next: Mashups Empowering End Users