APPLICATIONS

The staff at RENCI’s engagement center on the UNC Chapel Hill campus have been using Microsoft’s InfoMesa application as a tool for working with datasets in the center’s Social Computing Room (SCR). The SCR operates as a 360-degree desktop with visual displays running on all four walls, using 12 projectors behind each wall. The room is designed to help researchers work more intuitively and collaboratively in a data-rich environment. If you think of the four walls of the SCR as a whiteboard, InfoMesa allows any kind of data or visualization to be added to the whiteboard. Its tools are interactive, allowing data to be absorbed from data sources like Oracle, SQL Server, Excel spreadsheets, XML or even Cloud-based Web services. InfoMesa is a research project of Microsoft Life Science and Sam Batterman, a Microsoft specialist in business intelligence, data visualization and sensemaking for the life sciences, visited RENCI last summer to help integrate the tool into the SCR. InfoMesa is still under development and many new tools will be added to the finished product. For more on RENCI’s work with InfoMesa, visit Instance of Idea, the blog by Mike Conway, systems specialist at RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill. Or Sam Batterman’s blog.