The Association for Computing Machinery produces a regular journal called SIGKDD Explorations, where SIGKDD is an acronym for Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. I would classify the journal as academic, even though private-sector consultants or companies may be coauthoring articles.

In a recent issue, there is an article titled “Visual Analytics: How much visualization and how much analytics?”. The article makes the following claims:

• “Visual Analytics is the science of analytical reasoning supported by interactive visual interfaces.” (page 5)
• “The term Visual Analytics has been around for about five years now.” (page 5)
• “The core of our view on Visual Analytics is the new enabling and accessible analytic reasoning interactions supported by the combination of automated and visual analytics.”(page 5)

Altogether, these statements mean that Visual Analytics is a relatively new academic buzzword to define a specific field of research, namely the combination of automated analysis and visual representation. Someone might ask, how much does that description look like what people do with Excel? I would at first pass answer that Excel 2010 has exceptional graphic and visualization capabilities, but it does not inherently provide automated data analysis. However, SQL Server Data Mining adds the automated portion of this equation.

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