Visual Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

An umbrella term encompassing a new generation of online analytical processing (OLAP) end user tools for interactive ad hoc exploration of large multidimensional data volumes. Visual OLAP provides a comprehensive framework of advanced visualization techniques for representing the retrieved data set along with a powerful navigation and interaction scheme for specifying, refining, and manipulating the subset of interest. The concept emerged from the convergence of business intelligence (BI) techniques and the achievements in the areas of information visualization and visual analytics. Traditional OLAP frontends, designed primarily to support routine reporting and analysis, use visualization merely for expressive presentation of the data. In the visual OLAP approach, however, visualization plays the key role as the method of interactive query-driven analysis. Comprehensive analysis includes a variety of tasks such as examining the data from multiple perspectives, extracting useful information, verifying hypotheses, recognizing trends, revealing patterns, gaining insight, and discovering new knowledge from arbitrarily large and/or complex data volumes. In addition to conventional operations of analytical processing, such as drill-down, roll-up, slice-and-dice, pivoting, and ranking, visual OLAP supports further interactive data manipulation techniques, such as zooming and panning, filtering, brushing, collapsing, etc.