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Social Data Analysis

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...or a new slant on Business Intelligence.

From Tim O'Reilly's blog, two new sites in the area of social data analysis, or if you like, collaborative business intelligence.  Swivel lets you upload Excel spreadsheets or CSV files, create charts and share them for comment.  Many Eyes takes a similar approach, with more dynamic charts and richer visualisations.

Many Eyes Fernada Viegas explains how the two services differ:

Both our site and Swivel are examples of a broader phenomenon, which we call "social data analysis," where playful, social exploration of data leads to serious analysis. At the same time the two sites fall on different ends of a spectrum. Swivel seems to have some neat data mining technology that finds correlations automatically. By contrast, we've placed our emphasis on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. My guess is that both approaches will be successful because social data analysis is a powerful idea.

It's not too difficult to imagine how Excel Services could be used to build a similar service social data analysis service inside the firewall.  I wonder who will be the first of our BI partners to try to do that?

Technorati tags: Business+Intelligence, Collaboration, social+data+analysis, Excel+Services, BI, Swivel, Many+Eyes

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