The other day I was explained I had to wait until after the end of the month to see the most accurate numbers in a KPI dashboard. I was also lost in the amount of data and the number of filters I needed to navigate before I could get down to the use case I was interested in. My self-service analytics experience felt broken.
The amount of data your business users are exposed to when making critical decisions can be overwhelming. A focused, easily accessible view that leads you into the right information isn't always available, and when it takes too long to get answers, trust in the decisions that follow can erode significantly.
Embedding natural language and AI into data visualization tools is emerging as a mechanism to democratize access to insights for non-technical users, letting them ask questions and get answers when they need them. But we also need richer context and more dimension—visualizations that provide true clarity into swiftly changing landscapes for the multiple stakeholders across your organizations who are looking for different answers.
Case workers, researchers, facility managers and quality and safety control experts rely on full visibility into dependencies and fast, consistent answers. These professionals need to understand why things happen as they happen, compare historical patterns and draw on information from multiple systems to make confident strategic moves.
BI and data visualization tools, however, were never designed to handle today’s data scale and complexity as well as the demands for concurrent queries to your database. That’s why here at Progress we integrated the multi-model data and UI development capabilities across our product portfolio to help you give decision-makers access to real-time, AI-powered insights they can immediately act on.
Deliver Answer, Not Just Dashboards
The latest release of Progress MarkLogic FastTrack empowers developers to build enterprise React applications faster than ever and easily add conversational AI experiences to unlock access to actionable insight for more people across the business.
By combining our semantic RAG architecture with user-friendly search and data visualization components, you can deliver interactive and intelligent systems built on your data that equip business users with comprehensive answers in real time.
Users can type questions in a search box and get AI-driven summaries of the information they are looking for, while also seeing it clearly displayed in a map, chart, network graph or timeline. Users will also be able to see a list of citations with backlinks to source documents and explore the documents’ content directly in the app interface.
If they want to explore further and make sense of data already visualized in the application, they can use a chat interaction to ask specific questions to distill information and build understanding step by step instead of drowning in raw results. The data visualizations will adapt to the question and narrow down or highlight the data points that are relevant to the question. The interface can also be configured to dynamically generate filters based on the search response, so users can intuitively navigate information based on their use case.
Out of the box, the FastTrack ChatBot and AISummary widgets handle the search interactions using a prescribed endpoint API. The components work seamlessly with data stored in MarkLogic Server and will send the user query to the database, so you know the AI-driven answers will be accurate and exclusively grounded in your enterprise knowledge and inherit your security policies.
Empowering Exceptional Developer Productivity
When we launched MarkLogic FastTrack, we wanted to give developers an easy way to build search and visualization applications on top of their connected data so business users could explore information in context to make fast progress on critical work. By teaming up with the Progress KendoReact team, we’re making developers’ experience so much easier.
The new release delivers not just new features, but exceptional developer productivity with full access to the KendoReact award-winning UI component library of 120+ enterprise-grade UI components to build full-scale, enterprise-grade applications faster than ever. From charts to a powerful data grid to form inputs, KendoReact provides the building blocks required for search-heavy, data-driven applications where users need to slice, filter and explore large volumes of structured and unstructured data in real time. Instead of building custom components or stitching together multiple libraries, developers can rely on a unified, production-ready UI layer that accelerates delivery of complex data exploration experiences. It also comes with an AI-coding assistant to help get production-quality code on the first try.
Let’s look at more new components and features we’ve delivered.
Integrated Developer Environments
MarkLogic FastTrack now comes with support for popular IDEs like VS Code, IntelliJ, Atom and Eclipse so you can view the documentation directly in your preferred integrated developer environment to maximize your efficiency.
AISummary Component: Natural Language–Driven Experiences
Allow users to leverage natural language and AI to achieve a deeper understanding of large, complex datasets. The new AISummary component works seamlessly with the FastTrack search and an AI service provider of your choice to display a response to a user's query and a list of citations with backlinks to source documents. You can complement that with the ChatBot component and a RAG-based architecture built on the MarkLogic platform.
FileDisplay and EntityEditor Components: Easy In-App File Exploration
What if your users are researchers who are not necessarily looking at top metrics, but at billions of scientific papers?
You can now allow users to preview common file types directly in the UI and also edit the document metadata. The new FileDisplay widget enables you to display file content (XML and JSON, PDFs, Word documents, image files, etc.), including AI source documents and search results. The EntityEditor widget lists file properties and supports the editing them directly in the UI as well.
Give users more control over how they explore and filter information. You can now dynamically generate a faceted UI based on a user’s search response just by passing the MarkLogic search response facets into a single provider, without hand‑coding each facet UI one by one. This works out of the box with the new ApplyFacet provider widget and still allows customization of facet order, visibility and display type (lists, ranges, future chart options), so you get flexible, production‑ready faceting without redeploy your application.
Authentication and Authorization in the Faceted Search Example Application
Quickly build applications that offer secure, fine-grained access to information stored in MarkLogic Server. The Faceted Search example application included with FastTrack demonstrates JWT-based authentication combined with the MarkLogic element-level security. When viewing search results, users only see properties to which they are authorized based on their assigned roles.
From BI to UI to AI
We know there is a necessity for intelligence tools to evolve to intelligence platforms where data, AI and apps work as a connected ecosystem. Interactive, real-time and AI-powered exploration and analytics experiences help subject matter experts and decision-makers interpret complex data on their own, removing some of the demands on your data team.With Progress, you can build intelligent, contextual enterprise-scale applications powered by a single, integrated stack in record speed. By providing AI-powered insights to everyone, decisions can be made in minutes or hours to drive greater impact with intelligence at their fingertips. Meanwhile, IT and development teams can deliver reliable and efficient solutions to pressing business problems with unprecedented speed and agility, so your organization can truly capitalize on your data assets.
Sophia Kirova
Sophia is the Product Marketing Specialist for Progress MarkLogic. She brings more than 10 years of storytelling and crafting user experiences in the tech industry, currently focusing on product positioning and go-to-market strategy and content. Things that replenish her creative juices include good conversations, day hikes, bike rides and gallery visits.