Tom Sawyer Perspectives

Overview

Tom Sawyer Perspectives is advanced graphics-based software for building enterprise-class data visualization and social network analysis applications. It is a complete Software Development Kit (SDK) with a graphics-based design and preview environment. Tom Sawyer Perspectives combines the services of the company's visualization, layout, and analysis technology with an advanced and elegant platform architecture. Tom Sawyer Perspectives fully implements the Tom Sawyer data visualization reference architecture.

Design once and deploy to the Web or desktop

Tom Sawyer Perspectives is designed to enable teams to quickly develop production-quality data-oriented visualization applications. Developers use two graphic modules — the Designer and Previewer — to build applications around the specific types of data that drives each project. Using the Designer, they define schema, data sources, bindings, and filters, and specify flexible rules for the visual representation of the data. Developers can also use the Designer to create context menus and to specify custom toolbars, tooltips, and graphical viewing and editing behaviors. With the Previewer, developers can iteratively view the application design without needing to recompile. When used together, the Designer and Previewer provide an efficient round-trip process that dramatically speeds up application development.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives is architected to enhance design sharing, reuse, and ease application maintenance through four distinctive innovations:

• The Designer captures application design definitions in project files, where they are stored in an XML definition, removing the need for custom application software and upgrade complications. As a result, design elements can be built collaboratively, checked into repositories, shared between teams and applications, and reused more easily in future projects.
• Tom Sawyer Perspectives applications can be designed without consideration of the deployment architecture. After the application is designed, it can be deployed to desktop, applet, and Web Start applications, all reliably supported with the same interactive behavior. This approach is also compatible with AJAX thin-client image-mapped graphics applications that do not require plugins. Upcoming releases will add support for graphical HTML5 Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), providing interactive client-side graphics and reducing server loads. In addition, this "design once" approach is built to support the Apple iPad and iPhone, Google Android tablet and mobile phone applications, native Microsoft Windows and .NET web views, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and the upcoming Microsoft Windows 8 tablet operating system.
• The project-based definition of schemas and data integrations allows the development of applications that are largely independent from subsequent changes in the underlying data sources. When the data sources for an application change, only the integration definitions and bindings need to be updated. This isolation of design from data simplifies application management tasks in enterprise environments.
• When an application design is complete, developers only need to write one or two pages of code to load the Tom Sawyer Perspectives project and place the application components into their larger desktop or web application. Developers then link the appropriate libraries from Tom Sawyer Perspectives to add advanced analysis and visualization into their larger system.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives provides a foundation for building enterprise-class data visualization and social network analysis infrastructure that can dynamically update complex data from disparate data sources into a unified data model. A powerful data commit facility enables writing back to the data sources. New capabilities can be incrementally added without impacting existing designs, as the requirements for various applications evolve within an organization.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives Capabilities

• Graphics-based Software – An easy-to-use design environment dramatically simplifies the task of defining schemas, data integration, filters for highlighting salient data or trends, and synchronized visual representations of data and relationships. APIs are provided for additional customization.
• Integration with Application Data Models – Tom Sawyer Perspectives has model integration APIs that allow developers to populate a Tom Sawyer Perspectives data model from their existing in-memory application data model. Tom Sawyer Perspectives also offers a model event system that enables customer applications to listen to changes in the Tom Sawyer Perspectives data model as they occur. The customer applications can then perform processing to keep their application data model up to date.
• Integration of Data from Many Source Types – Data integrators for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, with federated update and commit facilities, support using disparate and distributed data types, from data sources located throughout the extended enterprise.
• Multiple Data Views – Multiple views, including drawings, tables, trees, and inspectors, facilitate the visual analysis of data and relationships from different perspectives. By working with Tom Sawyer Software or its integration partners, charting and mapping capabilities can be added without a complete redesign of the application.
• Several Drawing Layout Styles – Circular, hierarchical, orthogonal, and symmetric layouts enable the dynamic exploration of prominent data relationships in a drawing view.
• Advanced Graph Analysis – Graph analysis enables next generation applications that effectively address pressing analytic problems. Available methods include clustering and partitioning, dependency, impact and root-cause analysis, path finding, network flow, and centrality measures such as closeness, betweenness, and Eigenvector centrality.
• Advanced Navigation and Filters – Viewing techniques include flexible filtering, synchronized selection and highlighting, panning, and marquee, focal, and interactive zooming - all with high-level overview window integration. Complexity management techniques include support for nested drawings with drill-down, collapse, and expand. These techniques, working together in a unified architecture, provide highly interactive, easy-to-manage, and compelling visual querying applications.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives Advantages

• Faster Time-to-Value – Achieve lower cost and reduce the time to develop sophisticated applications through project-based application design. Capabilities such as rule-based filter design enable developers to build sophisticated and customized visual analysis applications with semantically selectable views of data. Developers can focus on the behavior of the filters rather than the detailed interaction with a data model. Organizations can exploit these capabilities to build customized applications more efficiently, to develop and deploy more powerful applications in less time, and to address entirely new classes of problems.
• Lower Development and Management Risks – Reduce the risks of developing and managing enterprise-class applications through design sharing, reuse, and software platform-agnostic implementations, decoupled from changes in the data sources.
• Increased Flexibility and Agility – Enable a single application design to deploy to multiple software architectures. Expand the reach of data visualization beyond the four walls of the enterprise by deploying the same application design on the desktop, the Web, or on tablet and mobile platforms.
• Market Leading Visualization Performance and Quality – Take advantage of the software industry's best graph visualization, layout, and analysis for unmatched drawing quality, performance, and scalability.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives Transforms How You Build Visualization Applications

Tom Sawyer Software delivers advanced data visualization and social network analysis technology the way you need it. Tom Sawyer Perspectives meets the needs of organizations to quickly create and deploy a wide range of sophisticated, flexible visualization and analysis applications.

Example Applications

Tom Sawyer Perspectives can be applied to a wide variety of industry settings, including financial services, network management, defense and intelligence, healthcare, enterprise software, and others.

Data Management	Enterprise	Genealogy
Life Sciences	Networking	Web Crawling