Data Visualization : Importance, History and Benefits

In this article we would cover about the meaning of data visualization, why is it needed, it’s importance, history of data visualization and its benefits.

What is data visualization?

Data visualization is the process of transforming data into graphical representations that are easy to understand. By making data easier to understand, data visualization can help decision makers identify trends and patterns that would otherwise be hidden in a mass of data.

Data visualization can be used to generate charts, dashboards, reports, maps and other kind of analytics.

Importance of data visualization

Data visualization is important because it can help you understand data more clearly and in a more efficient way. With data visualization, you can identify patterns and trends that would otherwise be hidden in a mass of data. Machines can but humans can not comprehend huge data sets without data visualization, whereas data visualization can help us see the entire data set and its relations.

Data visualization is also important in today’s data-driven economy where businesses are using data to understand their customers, create business intelligence reports to track their progress, and utilize big data tools to gain market insights.

Data is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. We are generating data at an ever-increasing rate, and the trend is only going to continue. The challenge for businesses and other organizations is to find a way to make sense of all this data and use it to their advantage.

History of data visualization

Data visualization for data interpretation has been around since the beginning of civilization. By using data visualisation, people could understand the world they lived in and make more accurate predictions about future events.

  • 1644 : Femish astrologer Michael Florent van Langren provided the first representation of statistical data
  • 1700: Thematic mapping emerged and abstract graphs of functions, measurements error and collection of emprirical data were introduced
  • 1800: William Playfair intrdouced some of the most commonly used charts
  • 1854: Physicial John Snow maps cholera outbreak in London on a chart
  • Early 1900’s: Data visalization starts gaining publicity and chart graphs starts making more and more appearance in books, magazines etc
  • Late 1900s: Advancement of computer processing and storage allowed to store, process and analyze more and more amount of data
  • 1960-1970s: Reseaches John Tukey and Jacques Bertin develop science of data visualization in statistics and cartography
  • Early 1980s: Edward Tufte publishes “The visual display of Quantitative Information” which is currently used in universities.

Benefits of data visualization

  • Data visualization makes data more useful and understandable
  • Data visualization can help you identify trends and patterns that would otherwise be hidden in a mass of data
  • Data visualization can help you make better decisions
  • Data visualization saves time and money

Data visualization’s focus is to provide a way for humans to get insights from data. Humans are not good at dealing with large amounts of data, but data visualizations can help them get through it faster and easier.

Data Visualization Tools

There are various kind of tools which are avalaible which can be used for data visualization. Most popular of them are charting engines, mapping engines, Business Intelligence products.

Some examples of charting engines includes. Their are examples of open source charting engines as well as paid charting engines. Some examples of charting engines are mentioned below. On charting engines also there can be flash based charts and javascript based charts, flash based charts are outdates and are sparsely used.:

  • google charts API
  • High Charts
  • D3 charts
  • FusionCharts

Similarly Business Intelligence products can be open source as well as enterprise software as well as another classification can be inmemory as well as non inmemory BI products. Some examples of Business Intelligence products includes tools are

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