The SDK is the core of Panopticon Software’s technology. It is designed to be used by OEMs, financial services companies, telecoms companies and other firms who need to develop and build applications that embed or integrate sophisticated interactive visual analysis and monitoring functionality into enterprise applications. It's a particularly good fit for companies that need to display and analyze streaming data. We use the SDK extensively ourselves; in fact, our Explorer desktop product and Enterprise web-deployed products are built using this same SDK. So yes, we eat our own dog food. We have added a lot of very cool functionality to the SDK over the past seven years and our development team has extensive experience with what is required from an SDK to support a wide range of applications. This new 5th gen SDK encapsulates years of sometimes hard-learned lessons that we have picked up both from customers who have used our SDK to build their own applications and from our own experiences in supporting different application scenarios over the years.
What is new, then? This is a major new generation of the SDK and therefore involves several significant changes. A couple of the most important ones are outlined below.
Firstly, a significant new architectural feature is “plug and play” both for visualizations on the display side (output) and for connectors on the data side (input). This may sound abstract, but it means that new visualizations and data plug-ins can be created and dropped into the framework during run-time. In application scenarios, this can be used to dynamically extend the set of display media and data connectivity options available in the application.
Secondly, another significant new architectural feature is that the SDK now adds the concept of shared state for visualizations. This is useful in many ways, for example in information dashboard application scenarios where multiple interactive visualizations work closely together using coupled filtering, brushing and linking etc.
Thirdly, there are also a couple of new implementations both for visualizations and for data models. On the visualization side there are two new visualizations particularly geared towards time series analysis, called Stack Graph and Horizon Graph. Together with the previously available bar chart visualization that we named Barseries, these new visualizations provide support for a range of time series analysis and monitoring scenarios.
Here are a couple of example screenshots that help explain what type of applications that can be created using the SDK. They come from a small application specifically designed for time series analysis of data. This application was quickly created a couple of weeks ago by a student doing an internship here. It makes use of the new SDK to enable an application to display real-time streaming data for technical analysis and monitoring of time series information. It utilizes the plug and play features by creating a visualization — in this case a traditional line graph — and by adding a custom connector that provides access to various types of time series data (historical stock data and something completely different — heartbeat data from a human subject.) 
This first screenshot that shows stock data which uses a prediction model to forecast the price and a display that visualizes where the forecast model deviates from the actual values for the stock price. 
This second screenshot shows heart beat data and how patterns can be defined to capture slight variations in the time series — something that may warrant an alert or warning notification to be triggered by the application.
We have a number of partners who are doing some really interesting things with our SDK and we’ll be talking about them in more detail in future posts. Watch this space!
Markus Skyttner
CTO
posted by Panopticon Blog #
5:13 PM
