Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. (www.stottlerhenke.com) has launched a new version of DataMontage, a Java class library for rapid visual analysis of complex, time-oriented data. Release 1.2 of DataMontage contains new features that enable users to customize how time-aligned data is displayed graphically, making the product more flexible and useful for a wider range of applications.

DataMontage enhances reporting and decision support systems for health care, pharmaceutical clinical development and drug safety, market analysis, engineering data analysis, complex systems monitoring, and military simulation analysis, planning, and after-action review -- applications in which professionals must interpret complex data and reach decisions rapidly by detecting patterns spanning many continuous and discrete variables. By presenting coordinated collections of graphs and timelines, DataMontage makes it possible to find important relationships in complex data much more easily and rapidly than can be seen using traditional graphs. Fine control over the graphical presentation of multi-attribute data points, reference values and regions, and layout enable analysts to detect important patterns and trends, interpret their significance, and discover causal relationships.

Among the new capabilities in DataMontage 1.2 are:

- Custom Icon Support, enabling software developers to draw application-specific icons to represent data points within XY graphs and timelines.
- Reference X/Time Intervals, which lets users create reference X/date-time intervals that are displayed as colored background regions, making it easier to visually compare the X/date-time values of time intervals and data points with reference X/date-time intervals.
- Multi-valued Data Points and Symbol Types, enabling users to store multiple values in each data point, which can be displayed using new symbol types such as box plots, diamond plots, y error symbols, range symbols, candlestick and open-close/low-high stock charts.
- Staggered Timeline Intervals, to more easily distinguish overlapping time intervals in the same timeline.

"DataMontage’s flexible presentation capabilities and deployment options enable it to provide interactive visualization within a wide range of data review and decision-support systems,” said Jim Ong, Group Manager at Stottler Henke. “With these new enhancements, DataMontage can speak the ‘visual language’ needed to discover and communicate important patterns in time-oriented data for diverse business, research, engineering, and military data analyses.”

DataMontage is a Java class library that offers unparalleled flexibility to display information-dense collections of timelines, time-series graphs and time-stamped notes. It allows users to view graphs and timelines stacked vertically or arranged in rows and columns to see patterns spanning multiple variables. Flexible control over the color, shape, and size of graph and timeline symbols lets users encode multiple attributes and highlight significant or unexpected data points. Colored lines and regions in XY graphs help users compare data points to reference values and ranges. DataMontage lets users see additional information associated with each graphical data element using mouse rollovers, popup HTML windows, and navigation to another web page.

DataMontage’s modular architecture and extensive Java programming interface enable it to be embedded within desktop applications, Java applets, and Java web server applications to provide powerful visualization capabilities throughout the organization. DataMontage’s published Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format enables programs written in Java or in other languages to configure and generate DataMontage displays.

DataMontage 1.2 is available immediately. Stottler Henke is marketing DataMontage to independent software vendors, systems integrators, and end user organizations. Pricing starts at $695 for a minimum configuration of developer and end user licenses.