Maybe the most exciting presentation this morning was about ARIS MashZone. It was given by Dr. Helge Hess. Helge started by outlining some trends we noticed in the past years and which finally led to ARIS MashZone:
- New visual interfaces such as the iPhone, but also several new rich web applications
- Mashing up different data sources. Here, Helge had a very nice example. He showed what happens if someone combines Beatles and Metallica - you get Beatallica :-) Helge also showed a short scene from the movie Minority Report where a police investigator played by Tom Cruise combines different data sources to come up with insights about a case.
- User generated content is another trend with prominent examples such as Wikipedia or Flickr.
- Finally, the programmable web is an important trend, too, because it allows accessing different data sources through public interfaces.
If you combine those trends in a single business application, you get ARIS MashZone. ARIS MashZone allows combining internal and external data sources in an intuitive manner, to create user generated business intelligence applications. Helge showed a short video demonstrating how such a MashApp can be created within seconds.
The main steps to create a MashApp are:
- Create a new dashboard
- Place a visual component such as a pie chart
- Connect the visual component to an internal or external data source
- Save and share your MashApp
Today, the restricted beta test of ARIS MashZone starts on ARIS Community. Participants of ARIS UserDay are invited to give the beta version of ARIS MashZone a test drive and report any problems or ideas in a private group here at ARIS Community. The final release of ARIS MashZone is expected in the coming months.
