"You're learning about your data through visualization and interaction," said Halle. "You can take all the data, selectively filter it, and look at it in a different way."

The four technologies that have reached a new threshold delineating G20 from G21 are advancements in data collection, storage, transmission, and presentation. I've posted a table that shows the progress from G19 - G21 in each of these technologies.

Visual data analysis facilitates human-data interaction by highlighting patterns, anomalies and alert conditions in reporting views...tables of data ready for human consumption. Visual data analysis enables data to be interpreted holistically by exposing contextually meanful attributes of the data set such as patterns, trends, structure, and exceptions. Visual data analysis may build upon prior logical processing via mathematical formulas, artificial intelligence or other automated mechanisms for analysis and improving data quality. Strictly speaking, visual data analysis primarily focuses on visual presentation of tabular views ready for human consumption.