SBIR Phase I: General-Purpose Software for Collaborative End-User Database Management

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将是帮助组织以结构化但可访问的方式组织运营数据，从而提高组织的工作效率。如今，组织倾向于在分散在用户和文件夹中的电子表格中积累此类数据，每次必须以新的方式呈现、汇总或集成数据时，都会创建新的副本和修订。这导致了繁琐的剪切和粘贴工作流程、代价高昂的错误，以及缺乏用于决策支持的可靠信息。这个项目提出了一个通用的软件解决方案，基于最近开发的交互式数据库可视化方法。该系统的新奇之处在于，可以轻松灵活地在屏幕上查询和布局数据，涵盖了以前需要定制编程的大量用例。应用程序可以在所有类型的组织中找到：公司、非营利组织、高等教育、科学、医疗保健、新闻、灾难响应、军事、公共管理等。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目将开发一个通用、用户友好的软件产品，组织中的个人可以使用该产品来存储和共享结构化数据以及各种数据显示，通过这些数据显示可以查看、查询和编辑这些数据。这种数据显示可以包括任意数据库查询、诸如交叉表、日历和条形图之类的可视化，以及诸如表单、仪表板和分层报告之类的非表格多查询可视化。使用建议的软件，组织可以减少在行政和管理任务上花费的时间，改进决策中的数据使用，在许多情况下，还可以消除长达一年的内部软件开发项目。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to make organizations more productive by helping them organize operational data in a structured yet accessible way. Today, organizations tend to accumulate such data in spreadsheets, scattered across users and folders, with new copies and revisions being made every time data must be presented, summarized, or integrated in a new way. This leads to tedious cut-and-paste workflows, costly errors, and a lack of reliable information for decision support. This project proposes a general-purpose software solution, based on a recently developed method for interactive database visualization. The system's novelty is in the ease and flexibility with which data can be queried and laid out on the screen, covering a large range of use cases that would previously require custom programming. Applications can be found in all manner of organizations: corporations, non-profits, higher education, science, healthcare, journalism, disaster response, the military, public administration, and so on.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a general-purpose, user-friendly software product that individuals within an organization can use to store and share structured data along with the various data displays through which said data is viewed, queried, and edited. Such data displays could include arbitrary database queries, visualizations such as crosstabs, calendars, and bar charts, as well as non-tabular multi-query visualizations such as forms, dashboards, and hierarchical reports. Using the proposed software, organizations can decrease time spent on administrative and managerial tasks, improve the use of data in decision-making, and, in many cases, eliminate yearlong internal software development projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.