An interesting description of visualization for business intelligence is provided in a forthcoming book by Roberto Battiti and Mauro Brunato. You can see online the pre-print version of the book “Reactive Business Intelligence. From Data to Models to Insight” , published by the Università di Trento (Italy) in December 2010.
The first chapters give a description of various information visualization techniques, from simple histograms to parallel coordinates and motion. In the second half of the book the authors explain advanced techniques for data visualization and modeling to gain business insight. To visualize the abstract concepts explained, they use visualizatios generated with the software program they developed, called Grapheur, a data mining and interactive visualization tool. A free evaluation copy is available for download.
The book is filled of nice quotes and comics as well: one of my favorites is the visual explanation of the dendrogram on page 49, and the definition of data mining on page 83: “Data Mining, noun 1. Torturing the data until it confesses. . . and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to confess to anything.” 😀
Sabrina Bresciani, Ph.D. 