So I promised to start
profiling more innovative, boundary-pushing Web tools on R/WW. The problem with this
strategy is that a lot of innovative tools are hard to grok - which means more work for
me. What have I gotten myself into? :-) Recently Thomas Bate of British data
visualisation company Visokio contacted me, to tell
me about his company's product Omniscope.
It's essentially a data filtering and manipulation tool for the desktop (Java-based), but
has some excellent Web integration too. They also have a product called FeatureFinder, used for creating data-driven
Flash files to embed in websites.
So why is OmniScope special? For one thing it has advanced structured data capabilities, which may have implications in Structured Blogging and may even be an alternative to RDF (yikes, don't tell Tim Berners-Lee that!). Thomas explained that Omniscope takes the most commonly-used structured data functionality of MS Office (Access, Excel, PowerPoint) and "adds data visualisation and an Adobe Acrobat portable file dimension." In other words, instead of manipulating your data in an Excel spreadsheet - which a lot of us do - you can use Omniscope to manipulate your data. The benefit is that it can also be integrated into web services and websites.
To see Omniscope in action, I downloaded the Omniscope 2.0 app and then went to the Demo page. I clicked on 'Mobile Phones' and was able to easily play around with the data there. Indeed it would be a great way to sort and filter mobile phone data on a phone retailer's website.
Manipulating mobile phone data with Omniscope
A good example of Visokio's technology in current use is on the London Stock Exchange website, which uses Omniscope to publish company and member data.
London Stock Exchange data on Omniscope
Thomas Bate also told me about the structured blogging and 'datacasting' implications of Omniscope, which I will have to leave for another post - as it gets complicated! But here is Thomas' final word about why Omniscope is potentially highly innovative in the Web world:
"We really believe that a scaleable desktop viewer/container for portable structured data that anyone can use (with no SQL or coding) will be the unsung hero and key enabler of the accelerating on-demand or Read/Write Web trend."
I can attest that Omniscope is easy to use and its visual and colorful interface for manipulating data is very compelling. I can see a great many uses for this on any data-driven website. In fact I'd love to see it in action on one of the big e-commerce sites like Amazon or eBay!
With so much data on the Web these days, we need tools to easily filter and sort that data - and personalize it. Omniscope seems like a big step forward in making that kind of data manipulation available on the Web.
Comments
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Richard- Thanks very much...just wanted to point out a typo...you have Omnidrive rather than Omniscope midway thru...may have been subconscious linking...Omniscope for Omnidrive...that is really an 'on demand' solution for data.
P.S. the next version of Omniscope is really good for opening folders of images and files and sorting/scrubbing all the hidden tagging....making it the ideal repository for personal tagged data.
Posted by: Thomas Bate | July 31, 2006 4:53 AM
you've gotten yourself into a competition with Techcrunch, that's what. :-) you start profiling new web apps, get some good advertising and you stand to make some good money. your site even looks similar to their layout. (not a bad thing imho)
Posted by: kit | July 31, 2006 4:56 AM
Oops, sorry for the typo Thomas. Fixed that now.
kit, thanks for the compliment - but I'm not competing with TC. I'm going after my own unique niche. Of course, "some good money" would be nice :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 31, 2006 5:28 AM
Hey Richard/Thomas, it looks like a very nifty application. You built it on Java, but is there a reason this couldn't be done in Flash? It would mean you wouldn't have to download the plugin (I'm not sure what the business implications of that are). Does Java provide a more robust environment for you?
Posted by: Ryan Stewart | July 31, 2006 11:15 AM
Hi, I am another Visokio person and thought I would respond to Ryan's message. We actually have 2 products, Omniscope, described above, which is the heavyweight Java desktop application that can be used to view hundreds of thousands of records and which is reviewed above, but we do also have a product called FeatureFinder that allows people to create Flash swf files (which we call Data Players) for use in websites or embedded within Powerpoint or PDF files. The data limit on that is around 5000 records however. We have some examples of these on our website, the most famous being CameraFinder which was used by Macromedia (as they were at the time) as one of the first examples of a Rich Internet Application. FeatureFinder recently won the Internet Innovator Award at the Internet World show in London, UK.
Posted by: Liam Bennett | August 1, 2006 2:24 AM
As Liam says, this question about Flash is the cue to segue into the discussion of our other award-winning application...FeatureFinder.
Visokio technology provides BOTH Java and Flash-based options in a comprehensive data management and publishing framework. Visokio Omniscope (Java) and FeatureFinder (Flash) applications work together as a system. Topical data sets prepared in Omniscope can be distributed not only as portable Omniscope files (with free download & install or as applet with performance hit) BUT ALSO converted into Flash 'DataPlayer' inserts that provide interactive visualisation and filtering within commonly-present desktop containers (browsers like MS IE/FF/Opera, or other document containers like Adobe Acrobat or MS PowerPoint.
As Liam notes, there are some limitations inherent in Flash. Visokio DataPlayers do not scale up over 5,000 records easily without optimisation and DataPlayers deployed on the open web do not support re-sizing of images or zooming of scanned floor plans or maps (except for Google Maps based mash-ups with Google doing the zooming).
Posted by: Thomas Bate | August 1, 2006 3:42 AM