Visual representation of data

Posted by Tom S.
Sep 2, 2010 at 03:43 PM

quant wrote:
>I think it’s not just the amount of data, it’s the “data with relationships” that it
>could display efficiently.
>Once you start to have multiple parents and links
>between “far” items, it’s impossible to display it in tree structure.
>Also programs
>like the brain, connectd text, mind raider have problem with that, because it’s in
>plane.

Your comments remind me of a story. When I was a graduate student I was putting together some data and presented my advisor with a graph that represented a 3 dimensional relationship. He said he ‘d always wanted to publish a graph like that. It was a very compact graph with a lot of information about the relationships involved. The problem was that no one could focus enough on any one of the relationships on the plot to be able to define the position of each point with the precision we required. In the end, we went with two 2D graphs to represent the data.

The need to evaluate the relationships in this program isn’t for anything quite as precise. But I was really overwhelmed with what I saw on the screen and I’m thinking it would be too easy to get lost in it and too difficult to focus on any one relationship.

Could be wrong.

Tom S.