Spotfire Tools, Guides, and Information Links

Spotfire overview
An overview of the Spotfire DecisionSite data analysis software.

We have extensive experience in the development of custom software modules within the Spotfire data analysis system.  Spotfire DecisionSite offers a wealth of sophisticated data visualization and analysis tools.  However, there are often needs for additional customization for particular applications.  The Spotfire system is very open, allowing customized software development on multiple fronts.  Most of our work has been with Spotfire DecisionSite client, with only limited work using the new TIBCO Spotfire product.

Example of custom Guides integrated with Spotfire DecisionSite

Guides

First, Spotfire offers the ability to capture difficult analysis workflows into a step-by-step "Guide" that can be executed by any user using their dataset.  We have developed many of these guides, for analyses involved in high-throughput screening, dose-response curve analysis, gene expresssion studies, etc.  These guides are made even more powerful by the inclusion of specific custom analysis tools (seel below).

information linksSpotfire Information Links allow users to retrieve data from databases without needing to understand SQL.

Information Links

Secondly, the Spotfire Information Interaction Designer system offers a quite sophisticated way to link to one or more corporate databases.   The data can be exposed to the DecisionSite users as "folders", from which the users can pick which data they want to retrieve, and to be prompted for specific filtering criteria.  Furthermore, specific data retrievals can be pre-packaged into an Information Link, which allows even the least sophisticated users to retrieve real-time data directly from the database by simply selecting the link and answering some simple filtering questions.  All of the complicated data access code is automatically generated.  We have designed many of these Information Links; in some very complex situations we need to do a small amount of manual modification to get the desired result from the links.

Tools

Finally Spotfire allows the development of custom data analysis tools.  The default package has a great many tools.  However we have found some additional tools are required for certain circumstances.  The customs tools can be integrated directly into the DecisionSite's "Tools" menu.  Here are some examples of custom Tools that we have created:

Universal Data importerUniversal Data Importer tool

 

Many of these tools can be made available at a fixed cost, because little or no additional customization may be necessary.  And of course, we are more than happy to develop completely new tools.  Almost any analysis tool that you can imagine can be added into the Spotifre system.  We write tool code in Javascript and VBScript, or VB.NET.  All code will be provided to allow you to further develop in the future, if required.  Note that all tools utilize the Spotfire Tool Automation model, which ensures the proper recording of the tool usage into Guides.