TIBCO Spotfire ships with an extensive set of built in visualization types, all with their own strengths for displaying specific types of data. It is important you select the most appropriate visualization to make your data easier to interpret and more informative.
The goal is to provide the appropriate information to your consumers. Different visualizations can be used to deliver different messages about your data, like the distribution of the data, trends and correlations in the data, and summary statistics about your data. Different visualizations are also suitable for displaying different categories of data, like categorical or continuous, aggregated or raw, and bivariate or multivariate.
The following figure depicts a flow that represents Spotfire visualizations that are good to use based off what message you are trying to display and what category your data is.
If
you would like more information on each visualization type, when you
would use it, why you would choose it over another visualization type,
we have a audio based eLearning module called Introduction to Data
Analysis and Visual Analytics which discussed this topic in detail in
one of its modules. The datasheet for this course is available from here
and you can register for the course here.
We also cover this topic in our Authoring Best Practices live webinar. Click below for more details and schedules:
http://inter.viewcentral.com/reg/TIBCO/advancedwebinars
There will also be future posts here which will discuss specific
differences between certain visualizations, like Box Plot and Bar
Chart, or a Line Chart versus a Scatter Plot.
Since it is very important to select the right visualization for your
message and data, you may have business requirements to display data in
a visualization that is not built-in to TIBCO Spotfire Professional. If
this is the case, our SDK allows developers or Spotfire Professional
Services to integrate existing charting components or built a new
visualization from scratch. The screen shot below is an example of a
Gauge plot integrated into TIBCO Spotfire for a specific business
requirement:
The visualization, once integrated, can utilize all the key aspects of
TIBCO Spotfire including marking, filtering, and drilldown.