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

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.