Turning data into intelligence—that's the challenge for Joel Drouillard, a research analyst at BondDesk Group LLC, and he's tackling it with Mathematica. Using Mathematica's powerful data handling and data visualization capabilities, Drouillard is gaining a deeper understanding and more accurate picture of how clients are using BondDesk's platform to search for fixed income securities. In this video, he describes how Mathematica helps him go deeper inside the interface, resulting in richer insights at a more efficient rate than ever before.

Consider the typical infographics found on the internet, many of which are only slightly less silly than this one by Jamie Schimley: If you want to regenerate a chart such as this in Mathematica using the PieChart function, you need hard data: the relative areas of the slices. You could eyeball the values and get an approximation, but since I deal with user interfaces I was immediately interested in creating one that would allow me to measure the angle of each sector of a pie chart. The following code creates locators that can be positioned to calculate the angle of any sector. Buttons let you record the angles as you measure them, and reproduce the chart at the end. (This could be done with less code, but I wanted a more complete interface with finishing touches like disabling the Print Chart button if you haven’t measured any angles yet, and showing the current angle with a tooltip.)

Weather visualizations are very interesting—there are television channels that thrive by showing nothing else. Online, there are several sources for specific maps of current weather conditions. Generally these are produced and maintained by government agencies or other large organizations. But with Mathematica 7, you can easily produce completely customizable weather visualizations on your own computer. As usual, this is made possible by Mathematica’s tight integration of several areas of functionality. Two new features that enable this particular application are powerful new vector visualization functions and built-in weather data. Vector visualization has been present in Mathematica since Version 2. In Mathematica 7 it has been dramatically improved, adding modern techniques in vector data visualization and new algorithms developed at Wolfram Research. Traditional arrow-based vector plots, new methods based on automatic streamline placement, support for vector glyphs and high-resolution images produced using line integral convolutions are all now supported.

Recent versions of Mathematica introduced an innovative way to interact with data. Computable data functions, such as CountryData and WeatherData, provide programmatic access to curated data in a form ready for computation. The idea of computable data has been so useful in Mathematica at large that we’ve been using it internally as well. We’ve packaged some of our internal data as in-house computable data functions, so that all of our colleagues can bring a quantitative edge to their work. I work on one such function: WebsiteData. We host several popular websites at Wolfram Research, so we collect a large volume of web server log data. WebsiteData provides access to our corpus of logs, which we can use to study how visitors interact with our websites. Here’s an example of WebsiteData in action. Let’s find the most popular demonstration from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project this past month: Whenever a visitor surfs to one of our webpages, our webservers (like all webservers) record the page requested, the time of the request, the URL of the page that had linked to our webpage (we call that the referrer) and the value of the visiter’s browser cookie and other incidentals. We’ve built up a rich interface in WebsiteData to provide statistics about these fundamental events aggregated in a variety of ways.

A couple of days ago I read about an unusual “swarm” of earthquakes at Yellowstone National Park. After reading up on this topic a bit (and determining that my home state of Illinois would not be obliterated immediately by a supervolcano outburst), I decided to make an animation about it in Mathematica. First I searched for “yellowstone map sdts” on Google and downloaded this geological map of Yellowstone from the U.S. Geological Survey website. After uncompressing the zip file, I simply pointed Import to the top directory containing the SDTS files: The resulting graphic contains a lot of distracting detail, so I decided to extract just the polygons and give them a muted gray background color. What remains are the outline polygons for each geological layer as observed by the USGS. Also, I set the image size to 1280x720, which makes it suitable for a 720p high-definition video stream: