Large amounts of data in Oil and Gas is exploration data and needs to be combined with GIS systems for visualization and analysis.

FORBES: Big Data: A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

If ManyEyes is a build-your-own kit car, then business intelligence platforms such as IBM Cognos, or SAP BusinessObjects are the Rolls-Royces of data analysis and visualization.

FORBES: Business Intelligence Begs The Need For Collaborative Capabilities

Companies like QlikView and TIBCO Spotfire are attacking this weakness head on by providing data analysis and visualization capabilities that allow end-users to assemble data, connect it, and explore it.

FORBES: A Vision for Unifying Access to Data and Documents

In a previous post, Sebastien Pierre provided some excellent analysis about the illuminating visualization produced by Paul Butler, which examined the relationships between Facebook users around the world.

FORBES: Why Animated Data Maps Work So Well

They will be those companies that early in the game focused on ways of handling data acquisition, analysis, storage, sharing, and visualization.

FORBES: The Death Of Big Data

Natural language-processing experts, visualization and integration engineers, and product managers also play a role in the data analysis chain.

FORBES: PayPal's Mok Oh On What Is A Data Scientist?

But the nature and visualization of this data is different as it comes from different sources and is used for different types of analysis.

FORBES: Big Data: A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words