As an illustration, we will propose you a tour through some statistical data on American cities. While data sets you will usually explore with ILOG Discovery are mostly business data, this data set has the advantage of being easy to understand, letting you focus on the process of visual data analysis with ILOG Discovery. This small data set is held in a simple text file, and contains a list of US cities, with some attributes such as its population, some socio-economic indices such as its crime rate, housing cost... 

You can open such a data set directly in ILOG Discovery by choosing Data > Open Text File, to view the data it contains:

While this view provides you the exact values for all data held in the table, it is difficult to figure out some simple facts: what is the largest city ? How is the data sample distributed accross various states ? Are there any correlation between say, Population and Housing Cost ?

ILOG Discovery lets you answer those questions with very little manipulations, and perform much more in depth analyses, visually, with a simple point and click interface.