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Chapter 4 • Business Reporting, Visual Analytics, and Business Performance Management 179

Google Maps has also single-handedly democratized both the interface conventions
(click to pan, double-click to zoom) and the technology (256-pixel square map tiles with
predictable file names) for displaying interactive geography online, to the extent that
most people just know what to do when they’re presented with a map online. Flash has
served well as a cross-browser platform on which to design and develop rich, beautiful
Internet applications incorporating interactive data visualization and maps; now, new
browser-native technologies such as canvas and SVG (sometimes collectively included
under the umbrella of HTML5) are emerging to challenge Flash’s supremacy and extend
the reach of dynamic visualization interfaces to mobile devices.
The future of data/information visualization is very hard to predict. We can only
extrapolate from what has already been invented: more three-dimensional visualization,
more immersive experience with multidimensional data in a virtual reality environment,
and holographic visualization of information. There is a pretty good chance that we will see
something that we have never seen in the information visualization realm invented before
the end of this decade. Application Case 4.4 shows how Dana-Farber Cancer Institute used
information visualization to better understand the cancer vaccine clinical trials.

Application Case 4.4
TIBCO Spotfire Provides Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with Unprecedented Insight into Cancer

Vaccine Clinical Trials
When Karen Maloney, business development manager inherent in the data registry. To gain a good under-
of the Cancer Vaccine Center (CVC) at Dana-Farber standing of the landscape, both an overview and
Cancer Institute in Boston, decided to investigate the an in-depth analytic capability were required simul-
competitive landscape of the cancer vaccine field, she taneously. It would have been very difficult, not to
looked to a strategic planning and marketing MBA mention incredibly time- consuming, to analyze infor-
class at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, mation from the multiple data sources separately, in
for help with the research project. There she met order to understand the relationships underlying the
Xiaohong Cao, whose bioinformatics background led data or identify trends and patterns using spread-
to the decision to focus on clinical vaccine trials as sheets. And to attempt to use a traditional business
representative of potential competition. This became intelligence tool would have required significant IT
Dana-Farber CVC’s first organized attempt to assess resources. Cao proposed using the TIBCO Spotfire
in-depth the cancer vaccine market. DXP (Spotfire) computational and visual analysis tool
Cao focused on the analysis of 645 clini- for data exploration and discovery.
cal trials related to cancer vaccines. The data was
extracted in XML from the clinicaltrials.gov Web results
site, and included categories such as “Summary With the help of Cao and Spotfire software, Dana-
of Purpose,” “Trial Sponsor,” “Phase of the Trial,” Farber’s CVC developed a first-of-its-kind analysis
“Recruiting Status,” and “Location.” Additional sta- approach to rapidly extract complex data specifi-
tistics on cancer types, including incidence and sur- cally for cancer vaccines from the major clinical
vival rates, were retrieved from the National Cancer trial repository. Summarization and visualization
Institute Surveillance data. of these data represents a cost-effective means of
making informed decisions about future cancer
challenge and solution
vaccine clinical trials. The findings are helping the
Although information from clinical vaccine trials is CVC at Dana-Farber understand its competition and
organized fairly well into categories and can be down- the diseases they are working on to help shape its
loaded, there is great inconsistency and redundancy strategy in the marketplace.
(Continued )

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