What Is Big Data Visualization?

Big data visualization is an art form, and it's not just for making fancy visualizations any more. The ability to visualize relationships within data has been around since the beginning of time. Cave paintings were used to illustrate the seasons, with images depicting what each season looked like. These cave paintings were always static. They didn't change as time passed. For years, big data visualization tactics have been limited to pie charts and bar graphs, but now we have applications that can display real-time changes and more illustrative graphics. These illustrations veer away from using hundreds of rows, columns and attributes toward a more artistic visual representation of the data. One of the most substantial things to remember when presenting data is that it's not just about numbers. It's also about relationships; relationships sometimes fit into a nice, neat little box. If you've got many numbers and want to present them to your audience, it might be tempting to use graphs. Graphs can be hard to read when there are lots of them, and they could be more interactive. The same goes for tables: they're great for finding specific information quickly, but if there are too many rows or columns, you'll need help finding what you need. So what do you do? If you want an easy way to present large amounts of information with all its connections intact, try data visualization! Data visualization uses more interactive, graphical illustrations - including personalization and animation - to display figures and establish connections among pieces of information. However, the main problem with this setup is that it doesn't correctly present very large data or data that includes huge numbers. For example, if you have a data set with 10^6 numbers, you'll have to scroll forever to get from the first number to the last one. Now, what if you have a dataset with 10^10 numbers? You'll be scrolling for days!