Starlight Information Visualization System
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Starlight is a software product developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It is an advanced visual analysis environment. Much like individual stars coalesce to form constellations, information visualization helps decision-makers see the importance of individual pieces of data by showing how they relate to one another.
The Laboratory's Starlight software, originally developed for the intelligence community, allows users to analyze data files with up to 100,000 records quickly and easily. Starlight uses shapes to represent pieces of information such as documents or news-wire reports. When relationships exist within the information, the shapes cluster together on the system's three-dimensional display.
Starlight launches a new generation in visualization technology by uncovering key relationships hidden in large, complex, dynamic information collections. Unlike other technologies, Starlight integrates structured, unstructured, spatial, and multimedia data, offering comparisons of information at multiple levels of abstraction—simultaneously and in near real-time.
Starlight is unlike any other information analysis tool. It is designed to capture and graphically depict complex relationships in data from multiple information sources. By making such relationships simultaneously visible Starlight enables exciting, rapid, and powerful new forms of concurrent information exploitation. The result is an unprecedented approach to information management and sense-making.
Subtle relationships are more easily recognized by looking at visual metaphors than at tables of data. As an example, Starlight might be used to look for correlations in a database containing records about chemical spills. An analyst could begin by grouping records according to the cause of the spill to reveal general trends. Sorting the data a second time, she could apply different colors based on related details such as the company responsible, age of equipment or geographic location. Maps and photographs could be integrated into the display, making it even easier to recognize connections among multiple variables.
The Laboratory began developing Starlight in the mid-90's, with funding from the Land Information Warfare Agency, a part of the Army Intelligence and Security Command. Starlight integrates visual representations of reports, radio transcripts, radar signals, maps and other information. The software system was recently honored with an R&D100 award for technical innovation.
The Laboratory is pursuing other commercial applications for Starlight, which could include law enforcement, patent analysis and medical and legal research.
