Data discovery

Data discovery is a business intelligence architecture aimed at creating and using interactive reports and explorable data from multiple sources. According to the United States information technology research and advisory firm Gartner "Data discovery has become a mainstream architecture in 2012".

Data discovery is a user-driven process of searching for patterns or specific items in a data set. Data discovery applications use visual tools such as geographical maps, pivot-tables, and heat-maps to make the process of finding patterns or specific items rapid and intuitive. Data discovery may leverage statistical and data mining techniques to accomplish these goals.

Data discovery is a type of business intelligence in that they both provide the end-user with an application that visualizes data. Traditional BI covered dashboards, static and parameterized reports, and pivot tables. Visualization of data in traditional BI incorporated standard charting, KPIs, and limited graphical representation and interactivity. BI is undergoing transformation in capabilities it offers, with a focus on end-user data analysis and discovery, access to larger volumes of data and an ability to create high fidelity presentations of information.

Data Discovery vendors include: Tableau, Qlik, TIBCO Spotfire, Microsoft Power BI, MicroStrategy, SAP (Lumira), Platfora, Datameer, ClearStory Data, AnswerRocket, and Datawatch.

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