First post - interested in UX and data visualizations

[Innography]

I'm a new member and wanted to post my interests to the group to see
if anyone had comments or suggestions.

I am the CTO for an IP (patent) intelligence company here in Austin.
We have a massive amount of patent, financial, litigation, etc data.
One of the challenges we face is the ability to turn terabytes of
quantitative data into simple, "WallStreet Journal" type of charts.
We focus on executives who are not power researchers, but need to get
their answer quickly and in a way to communicate easily with boards or
management.

I'd be interested in any thoughts/recommendations for metaphors that
are helpful in the Business Intelligence space, or in enabling upper
management to do research without a huge learning curve. We're a big
fan of Tufte and other visualization gurus, so UX is a passion of
ours. We're early in the process, but have a lot of opportunity in
making sense of the data.

Any stories, links, references, etc you can post here would be much
appreciated.

Thanks.
Tyron, Innography

[Joe [at] subprint.com]

Hey Tyron,

Not sure if it will satisfy your objectives, but Google has a fairly
powerful visualization API:

http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/

I use many of Google's web services from Maps to Translation to Charts
and beyond so I may be slightly biased, but their APIs are highly
intuitive and can easily be ported to a JavaScript library such as
jQuery.

Cheers.

Joe

www.subprint.com