Starlight Information Visualization System

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed a software solution to quickly visualize common themes in large disparate data. Starlight Information Visualization System has enabled nearly 40 entities to access and interpret information about business intelligence, consumer trends, medical records, current events, and cyber security data; and to enhance their operations by exploiting the data to their competitive advantage. Some companies report saving millions of dollars in the process. These companies use Starlight to extract consumer and product information pertinent to their business operations from enormous masses of data that previously were virtually inscrutable.

Starlight performs high-speed, high-efficiency analysis, and displays the results graphically so that the relationships among the data and their implications can be quickly and easily understood. While other commercial software products support only a few predefined data types, Starlight supports the concurrent analysis of an unlimited variety of information types. Furthermore, the software combines multiple visualization techniques allowing many different aspects of large information collections to be analyzed simultaneously. With this built-in flexibility, Starlight offers insight into and the ability to address a wide range of problems that previously was difficult or impossible to interpret.

Starlight was developed originally for intelligence analysis applications, and its national security uses continue to expand. But the astute and innovative researchers who developed Starlight recognized that its capabilities were germane to many enterprises in the commercial marketplace and directed efforts to successful technology transfer.

Starlight expedites knowledge discovery and strategic decisionmaking that could lead to advances in scientific discovery, energy distribution, remote sensing and many other areas.

Between 2000 and 2005, nearly 40 licenses were issued to organizations ranging from government offices to academia, from small competitive intelligence companies to large organizations, including Proctor and Gamble, a major automotive manufacturer, the Ohio State University, University of Delaware, Oregon Health Sciences University, Synaptics, the government intelligence community, the Veterans Administration, and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center. These customers consistently report that Starlight provides a higher level of visualization analytics capability than any other product on the market today.