[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Karl Fast]

> > Similarly, not all visualization applications involve interactively
> > streaming multi-terabyte databases for large numbers of concurrent
> > users. 
> 
> What's otherwise currently difficult is to make sense of gigantic datasets.

But what's gigantic?

A few million records is just as tough to make sense of as a few
billion.

Consider university library catalogues, the number of films in the
IMDB, Amazon, or scientific journal databases like Web of Science
and INSPEC.

All of these databases:

  - have millions of records, not billions
  - are widely used by large numbers of people
  - are growth constrained (eg: the IMDB won't grow exponentially)

The point I'm trying to make is that, yeah, billions of records is
real hard but there are plenty of applications in the million record
category.

There are big wins in the boring, average, couple million records
space.



--karl