The usage of ISOTYPE Charts in Business Intelligence Reports - The Impact of Otto Neurath Work in Visualizing the Results of Information Systems Queries

摘要

Business Intelligence (BI) systems are designed to provide managers with a user-friendly way to build and analyze reports. Nowadays, BI systems make available a large range of graphics tools for displaying such reports. Nevertheless, these systems disregard so far the immense potential of using ISOTYPE approach for graphic display of statistics. ISOTYPE was created by the Austrian social scientist Otto Neurath (1882-1945). It is the acronym for International System of TY pographic Picture Education. ISOTYPE aims to create a system for communicating the analysis of social and management data for a broad audience that includes the laymen and the experts. The reason for not using ISOTYPE in BI systems may rely on the difficult to build algorithms that realize what Neurath described as the transformation phase of working over collected data. In this phase, data must be grouped in a proper way that facilitates further display and understanding about what we can conclude out of the data. In this article, we propose that BI systems could include ISOTYPE based tools for visualization. In order to illustrate our ideas we built a BI system that displays statistics on charts built according to ISOTYPE approach.