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The Second Life Dashboard gives an overview of the available information about the current status of Second Life.
The information is shown using different types of charts together in one page.
For some parts of the dashboard a drill-down is possible to view more detailed information.
The goal of a dashboard is to give an overview of the situation on one page without too much detail.
The dashboard is divided in three parts, e.g. user activity, economy and land. The top of the dashboard shows
a time line that allows users of the dashboard to select data from another date.
The dashboard is build using data available from several sources about Second Life. All sources
used are official SL sources, no third-party information was used to create dashboard. The data sources
can be divided in 3 types:
- In-world data sources (retrieved using "bots")
- HTML data sources (Second Life Web pages)
- XML data sources (Second Life Web API).
Applications retrieve data at regular intervals and store this information in a data warehouse. This information is
then aggregated in small tables that are used by the dashboard to load the data quickly.
There is much more data available about Second Life than can be shown in a dashboard.
We had to make a selection of information. When dashboards are developed, the future users are asked
what they consider to be important information. Sadly, we have not done this. First, because it
would haven taken a lot more time to ask a representative sample of Second Life users. Second, the users
have a very widely interest. It will not be possible to satisfy all SL users. When developing a
dashboard for a company, there is always a rather homogenous set of users; they have a common goal,
e.g. increases efficiency of operations or get an overview of the most important key performance
indicators. This common goal does not exist among SL users.
We have based the selection of information to show on following criteria:
- Show the large variety of data, including information of user activity, economy and land usage.
- Use those data that make a visually appealing dashboard (a criterion that never should be used
when developing a dashboard for a company).
- Show information that interest us.
We would like to hear what your opinion is. You can contact us via e-mail,
on twitter or
in-world.
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