SOCR data dashboard: an integrated big data archive mashing medicare, labor, census and econometric information

Abstract

Introduction Intuitive formulation of informative and computationally-efficient queries on big and complex datasets present a number of challenges. As data collection is increasingly streamlined and ubiquitous, data exploration, discovery and analytics get considerably harder. Exploratory querying of heterogeneous and multi-source information is both difficult and necessary to advance our knowledge about the world around us. Research design We developed a mechanism to integrate dispersed multi-source data and service the mashed information via human and machine interfaces in a secure, scalable manner. This process facilitates the exploration of subtle associations between variables, population strata, or clusters of data elements, which may be opaque to standard independent inspection of the individual sources. This a new platform includes a device agnostic tool (Dashboard webapp, http://socr.umich.edu/HTML5/Dashboard/) for graphical querying, navigating and exploring the multivariate associations in complex heterogeneous datasets. Results The paper illustrates this core functionality and serviceoriented infrastructure using healthcare data (e.g., US data from the 2010 Census, Demographic and Economic surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Center for Medicare Services) as well as Parkinson’s Disease neuroimaging data. Both the back-end data archive and the front-end dashboard interfaces are continuously expanded to include additional data elements and new ways to customize the human and machine interactions. Conclusions A client-side data import utility allows for easy and intuitive integration of user-supplied datasets. This completely open-science framework may be used for exploratory analytics, confirmatory analyses, meta-analyses, and education and training purposes in a wide variety of fields.

3D Shape Modeling for Cell Nuclear Morphological Analysis and Classification

“…We performed exploratory visual analysis of extracted features using SOCRAT 49 , a web platform for interactive visual analytics. The goal of visual analytics is to support analytical reasoning and decision making with a combination of highly interactive visualizations and data analysis techniques 49,63 . SOCRAT implements a visual analytics workflow that encompasses an iterative process, in which data analysts can interactively interrogate extracted morphometric measures in the form of interactive dialogue supported by visualizations and data analysis components.…”

Volume and value of big healthcare data

“…An instance mashing these heterogeneous and complex data (for 2012) is aggregated and distributed by the SOCR Data Dashboard (http://socr.umich.edu/HTML5/Dashboard) [6]. The energy of the integrated data archive is more than the sum of the information content contained within each database individually.…”

SOCRAT Platform Design

“…Although mainly designed for educational purposes, the suite of SOCR tools enabled visual analytics workflow for interrogation of the dataset interactively by visualizations and data analysis. Examples include California ozone pollution case study using SOCR Charts and Analysis [17] and visual analysis of big medicare, labor, census and econometric data with SOCR Data Dashboard [21]. …”