One month ago (already !) was Carto2.0, a conference organized by 3 actors of the French Visual Thinking scene :

• Francis Moaty : teacher at ESIEE, co-founder and director of the MISTE (Master in Scientific, Technical and Economical Intelligence)
• Claude Aschenbrenner : entreprise architect at Euroclear, blogger and member of the pedagogical team at MISTE
• Christophe Tricot : PhD, research engineer at Mondeca and blogger

The papers presented at that conference can be downloaded here, or viewed here (in Flash format), but since everything was in French, I am going to report a few bits in English as I believe it could interest more people than only French speaking readers

I was invited to present some of the research I had done for a previous blog entry on navigation interfaces for information sites last November (see a French version here : Les interfaces de navigation pour les sites d'information ). That included some best practices from leading French sites such as Rue89.com, Agoravox, … (see Social Media Club Paris for more info), but let's speak about what I have seen.

I have missed the opening words from Alain Juillet, the French Chief Representative for Economic Intelligence at SGDN, but was enthralled by Guy Melançon's opening plenary session. A doctor in mathematics from UQAM (Montréal), he now does research for CNRS' LaBRI and INRIA's Futurs - Gravite labs in Bordeaux. He has a background in graph drawing and has worked on pattern recognition in graphs. He mentioned a few very interesting references for people dealing with data-mining, BI and in general heavy information interface design :

• Visual Analytics (Thomas & Cook, 2006)
• Multi-faceted insight through interoperable images (Alfred Inselberg)
• KDD panel, the perfect data-mining tool : automated or interactive (Mihael Ankerst, 2002)
• Zoom, filter, analyze : the "Details-on-Demand" approach (Daniel Keim, 2006)
• and of course "The eyes have it" (Ben Shneiderman, 1996)
  

And he offered a solution to Tufte's limits adapted to Moore's law : make the maps interactive

He is also a strong advocate of crowdsourcing as a collaborative approach to looking for patterns in massive databases of data. He mentioned the example of IBM's Many Eyes experiment, where viewer's comments will reveal phenomenons and create new knowledge (see Catherine Lenglet's article on this blog last year)

We then had a presentation by Serge Guillard on business mapping. A director at Mark Company, he is a strong advocate of organization mapping (process, org charts, activities, procedures, job descriptions, …). His presentation was very exhaustive, including examples of work he'd done for Carglass and the CNES. Serge is the co-author of a book on graphical process description : free Visio templates to download here.

We then had very interesting presentations from leading French companies in the data crawling / intelligent agents fields (Cybion) and search engine / data visualization fields (Kartoo). 

Cybion was started in 1995 by Carlo Revelli (also the founder of Agoravox), and quickly made a name in search, with some of the first intelligent agents, crawling the web to gather information on a given subject (we did not have Google at that time ;-). Their presentation (made by Mounir Rochdi, founder of the first competitive intelligence community in Marocco) was on risk analysis and crisis anticipation on internet : identification, mapping, evaluation, simulation and display on a dashboard.

The next presentation was by Laurent Baleydier, CEO and founder of Kartoo (founded in 2001, see a recent article by The Next Web). He presented 3 strategies for search on Internet, very smart approaches that can help us sorting out information :

• take a bird's eye view, using semantic maps, and then zoom in on the zones of interest (Kartoo's speciality but also Quintura) ;
• start with a fixed / known point and navigate away from it (think Musicovery, Flickr of YouTube network graphs) ;
• or for those complex searches (10% of the requests = 50% of the time spent searching), use tools that recommend keywords to refine search such as Grokker or KVisu (Kartoo's new tool).

As an interesting feedback, he shared with us that most of KVisu's search users start with the list and after 1 months usage of the maps increase by 30%. This proves a rather quick learning curve that was made possible through a very structured usability  / HCI design process of the tool. Kartoo is a Google partner (they distribute their Google Mini and Search Appliance). See more info on their blog.

The last presentation I attended was Maxime Crepel and Dominique Boullier's. Dominique, whom I first met as head of the Lutin usability lab, presented us with Maxime their research objectives. They focus on tagclouds as graphical interface for navigation (and you know I am a fan ;-). Also the director of the Las lab (Sociology and Anthropology) in Rennes (see the blog he co-author with Audrey Lohard on virtual worlds as part of a research project), he works with Maxime (PhD student, also engineer at the SENSE lab at Orange R&D), whom I had already heard as he worked on "weak cooperations" with Dominique Cardon and Nicolas Pissard (now with faberNovel), and some other projects (see the website anoptique.org).

They are among other things trying to measure the level of information depth (colors, font size) that is appropriate for an optimal use.

Among the presentations I have missed (but I had the opportunity to chat with them and re-discover their work) were (non exhaustive list) :

• Guilhem Fouetillou's. He is the co-founder and President of the RTGI Group, the editor of a very nice visualization engine that was used during the last French presidential election to display the Blogopole, a map of all political blogs by affinity. See a very interesting presentation on Slideshare describing all kinds of social network analysis he did. He is now doing it for the US 2008 election :

• Jean Delahousse, founder of Mondeca, a French semantic web company, who did a presentation of cartography and ontologies.

• Olivier Nerot, founder of amoWeba and Social Computing, who designed the network navigation tool used by Societe.com to analyze company's board members, and investors links with other individuals or companies. A great competitive intelligence tool :

• Christophe Douy, from Pikko Software, editor of the Arak4Wiki solution, a complete solution for wiki editing and navigation, including EasyKube (treemaps), VisionLink (network graphs), etc… that looks very powerful and builds on works from the same CNRS Labri lab from Bordeaux where Guy Melancon works.

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This is the end of August and the agendas are filled with "summer universities" like the French Entrepreneur's Federation MEDEF (see their live / cross blogging initiative I have been invited to take part on the blog Jouer le Jeu, aka Play the Game), and some companies like Capgemini Consulting for which I will host a workshop on some topics I am sharing with you today, going over some of my past year discoveries and learnings.

We live in an information world and the pure volume of information available is increasing exponentially (IDC/EMC 2007 and Berkeley 2003 studies). At the same time the number of interactions (as one-way or two-way ponctual information exchanges) between persons and/or computers is multiplying rapidly, thanks to the internet revolution and the globalization of our economy. Those « connections » (permanent associations or punctual contacts) are creating a number of opportunities to solve the everyday issues we are facing with.

Thanks to new tools (creation) and economical opportunities (incentives) the distinction between information producers and consumers is not static anymore, this is what has been called the revolution of social media (user generated content, folksonomics, wisdom of crowds, …) :

• Brands need to rethink their communication with their consumers, engage in a conversation with them, build and sustain communities of users ;
• Knowledge (long thought to be limited to encyclopedias, academic books, …) does not consist in « one-off », elitist and formal products anymore since Wikipedia democratized it’s creation and sharing ;
• Managers need to take more and more decisions within a shorter time frame, often with too much data to analyze, or too much « noise » and not enough pertinent information ;
• Major undertakings do not necessarily require major investments from one individual organization as « crowd sourcing » or distributed computing solutions have allowed to search for lost individuals or to analyze large quantities of data ;

This is an overview of experimental solutions to this issue, that I have separated in 2 aspects (some products are doing both, but this a minority) :

• Traceability : new tools that keep track of every information exchange in a standardized, searchable and « mashable » format :
• search engines and crawlers such as Google (Search History, Trends, and Co-Op tools like the Tracker and Customized Search Engine), and Technorati,
• social tagging tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Stickis,
• and crowdsourcing tools such as VisiblePath, Amazon’s ACF and Mechanical Turk, and Inkling Prediction Markets ;
• Visualization : new tools that allow easy analysis, interpretation of data to create knowledge and presentation / sharing to an audience :
• data display tools such as IBM’s ManyEyes, GapMinder's Trendalyzer, and Swivel,
• words / tags display tools such as VisualThesaurus, Delicious' Tagclouds,  and Kartoo,
• 3D visualization tools such as Microsoft’s Photosynth, and Google's Sketchup (included in Google Earth),
• social networks visualization tools such as LivePlasma, TouchGraph, Facebook’s FriendWheel, and VisiblePath,
• and online sharing versions of presentation tools such as mind mapping, and Powerpoint SlideShare.

On the definition and etymology of innovation and creativity, the differences between information types : click here

A gallery of the largest collection of visualization techniques and use examples : VisualComplexity

For fun : a nice application that links song lyrics to images randomly extracted from Flickr, and another analyzing breakups (called The Dumpster) between people from blog comments.

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Remember KeyHole and how Google transformed it in Google Earth ? And Sketchup that it also acquired and released it for free for people to make 3D objects to be plugged into Google Earth or simply as standalone objects ? Their latest disruptive move (see the article by Paidcontent) is named Trendalyzer from the non-profit GapMinder. This is a powerful tool for easy creating and rendering of animated graphics, the kind to reconcile a student with statistics and to allow even the most stubborn manager to see the evidence in a trend drawn from thousands of numbers and tables. The tool is available there : http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

Trendalyzer was shown by Hans Rosling, a Swedish teacher at the TED 2006 conference : I can not urge your more to have a look at the video, it is brilliant !!! I wish I had a teacher like him … with such tools we will probably get more students that go for scientific education Not speaking about BI (Business Intelligence) softwares for corporations … As he said : his goal is to liberate all the data from the publicly funded databases and make it searchable to then display it … guess what : his dream will probably come true rather sooner If Google goes the same way than with Google Book, negociating deals library after library, content owner after content owner, it may soon be possible to access in a nice and powerful way data about just anything (if there is enough potential for monetizing this content through advertising or else …). Just think about the possibilities of analysis, of better decision making, of better understanding … Just link this with approaches like Pipes from Yahoo! and you will get very powerful mashups from innovative minds all around the world… Once again the power of visual information …

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