The Importance of Data Visualization Tools in Modern Enterprises

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FHm6Ngz4h9yhXp9-2S5BjVKzxjma0FZP&usp=drive_fs

In today’s business world, data visualization tools have become a key component for many companies. This is the case also for ContentWise, a company that mainly works on recommendation engines and metadata enrichment. They have developed Data Insights, a plug-in service for the UX Engine that allows us to create and deliver custom dashboards to expose in a visually clear and effective way to the clients the incredibly high value generated by ContentWise’s software. The current implementation is based on Apache Superset 1.0, which provides most of the needed functionalities out of the box, but it also presents some important limitations. The aim of this thesis project is to identify possible solutions to improve the current product. We started with a market analysis of the available tools in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the main actors in the data visualization and exploration fields. After that, we came up with two possible solutions: the first is a completely custom web application built with the Next.js framework while the second leverages the 2.0 version of Apache Superset with all its improvements. In both cases, we integrated Cube as a semantic layer to increase flexibility and provide better performances. The project ends with the evaluation of proposed solutions to identify the one that better fits ContentWise’s needs.