News

XML transforms data into graphical display

• By Rich Seeley
• March 19, 2003

Data views with people, corporations and the information about them represented with icons, along with relationships that are graphically depicted, is the promise of XML-enabled technology from Anacubis, a Cambridge, England-based division of the Washington, D.C.-based i2 Group.

The Anacubis Viewer is said to build on i2's research and development of visualization and analysis technologies used by worldwide law enforcement agencies, according to Anacubis official Jonathan Hirshon.

In a business intelligence application, the Viewer can sort through corporate databases to show things such as relationships between customers to help sales and marketing organizations plan strategies, Hirshon explained.

XML tags are used to identify relationships and associate data with the icons that represent it, he added.

"We have our own XML schema we've created for visualization," Hirshon said. "It's optimized specifically to visualize large amounts of information. What our viewer does is take that XML schema and then render it in a visual fashion. The data is meta tagged with specific XML tags so one item might say: 'This particular tag is related to a corporation. This particular tag is related to a competitor corporation.' Then the Viewer takes that XML tag, transforms it and puts it into a visual fashion."

The Viewer is scheduled to be available by the end of March, said Hirshon. To give developers and users an idea of how it works, an implementation of the Anacubis technology in the Google search engine is also scheduled to be available at month's end. It may be accessed at http://www.anacubis.com