Visualizing Streaming Data

Chapter 16. Summary and References

Decide what you’d like to achieve. What impact are you looking to have? What in your workflow could benefit from regular human interaction or already involves a lot of human interaction? What benefit could knowing complex information before tomorrow provide? This should help give some basic direction on whether to develop a web, native, or mobile app and what data to look for. So that you aren’t overwhelmed with a giant pie in the sky, it might also help to define the time frame and people you have available to work on the project.

Links Mentioned

The links mentioned throughout this book and links to additional references can be found in the book’s GitHub repository.

Data

You can approach your visualization project from at least three angles to help fill in the blanks:

• What data do you already have that you can stream? If it’s being written to a database, you can stream transaction logs. If it’s written to a log, you can stream the log updates. Often, listing the data you have available will bring new ideas to mind about what you can do, not just fill in the blanks for your original plan.

• What data do you need to accomplish your goals? Try to think about this without considering current obstacles. There are a lot of ways to get the data you need. The obvious approaches, like getting it from an existing API or database, may not meet your needs. Think about how you could get the data you want; you can decide later if it’s worth ...