Blog: Dan E. Linstedt

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3-D Visualization of Data Models

In the world of Nanotech, chemistry, biology and medicine we already have 3-D modeling capabilities for everything from Neurons to Chemical compounds to molecular structures. The business users in these areas are already manipulating their own structures, producing "fly-throughs" and interactive mappings of their modeling world.

Why then doesn't the BI community have the same? Why must our business users and our data modelers be stuck in the stone age? What is with the standard and traditional 2D modeling approaches of today’s' data modeling tools and BI Query Tools?

These are problems that I think the vendors should step up and solve. It's been years since the business truly understood why, where, and how their information is stored (of course, there are some truly great data modelers out there who go to great pains to make the models conform to business, bravo I say).

But what about the rest of us? Why do we insist on simple 2D data models? Why can't we incorporate shading, gradients, depth and 3D views of the data sets and their activity? What would an INTERACTIVE data model such as this reveal about our businesses?

What if someone adapted a chemical modeling software product to act on data models, and we applied different interaction rules - such as gathering metrics of usage, volume, performance, join capacity, redundancies, and compression ratios. If we could then apply these rules in a dynamic fashion, we can play visual what-if games with our enterprise architectures, what mathematical formulas in brilliant colors - and see how our businesses may be affected by changes to the model, structures, indexes, and so on.

This would be a world like no other - we could begin to explore the real business rules. Hopefully we could "walk through" the model, represent height, depth, color, perspective, shading and gradients to act as guides in our world of data; "Data Art" if you will.

Ok back to the real world, how does this benefit business?
1. If RED meant trouble, (size trouble, or performance trouble, or some other marker - metadata) we could easily identify the Red areas of our business.
2. If Height meant activity, then we could see the areas of data that receive the most activity (either refresh or utilization - additional dimensions to shade with).
3. If Perspective and depth meant reach, or span across the business, we could begin to view our business in a whole new light.

Finally, going back to the original example, we as IT and data modelers could bring the data (in a representative format) back to the business users, and probably "play all day" with what-if scenarios without ever making a modeling change. The impacts could be very dramatic, the time savings tremendous. I just wish I had a tool like this today, anyone interested in funding a software startup?

Cheers,
Dan L

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