The data homunculus

One of the constant challenges for anyone developing an analytic application is how to simplify something that is inherently complex from the start. This requirement rides above the underlying complexities inherent in any enterprise grade solution, regardless of architecture, process flow, or data sources. Once you’ve figured out how to build and integrate an application that provides depth and breadth of intelligence for your business application, how do you make it understandable to a non-technical audience? One of the technologies I’ve been looking into involves creating models using hypercubes, which lets you map multi-dimensional data and keep it updated in real time. Rather than looking at two or three dimensions, a really effective model needs to include far more dimensions than most people are comfortable with from a visual perspective. The challenge is then capturing the data, making sure it’s clean, then integrating across an n-dimensional framework and making it compelling enough for a business person to want to use it. I’m trying to apply this framework to a consumer model across multiple dimensions, essentially creating the data equivalent of a homunculus (a term used to describe the distorted human figure drawn to reflect the relative space our body parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex, and the motor cortex). It would represent a scalable, temporally-driven framework for describing why different consumers interact the way they do in an on-line environment, which would allow people targeting the consumer to build out a site/offer/etc. that would map precisely to that consumers needs. I’ll comment more on this later as I get the idea more fleshed out.