Yesterday was information visualisation day, apparently.

In the morning, Perry from CakeHouse Systems came in to chat about their Antology product, which aggregates, organises and visualises large datasets based within organisations. Good product - worth a look if you want to pull together many diverse data sets for common analysis/mapping. They have put lots of effort into abstracting the data gathering and analysis layer.

In the afternoon, Matt and I tried to scope out what we would like to see from a generic social network mapping tool that can deal with people, organisations, ad-hoc groups, with n levels of correlations on top (shared interests, common associations, location, etc). In particular, we are interested in identifying an underlying network map based on linkages between nodes (e.g. people and groups) onto which we can overlay contours showing relative weightings for the common metadata associated with each node, their use of key concepts based on keyword analysis, etc.

Then, in the evening, I came across this note from Clay Shirky on a paper about visual analysis of social networks by Linton Freeman. A comment to Clay's piece also cites a PhD dissertation by Tamara Munzner that has links to some videos of infovis analysis and some software used to produce such maps.

These things always seem to come in threes....

Anyway, whilst this is a fascinating area and one we shall explore further, I wonder whether anybody has seen examples of network visualisations that *really* tell them something they couldn't get from other forms of analysis. 2D computer screens are a very poor medium for this sort of thing, and whilst we all like to see examples of network maps, it is no mean feat to produce meaningful representations of linkages and commonalities from multi-dimensional datasets.

Worth remembering as well that there is still a role for other types of "manual" maps, which have infinitely greater scope for flexibility and therefore applicability to a specific requirement.

Can anyone point to a killer visualisation in businesses other than the National Grid, air traffic control, etc., that had an outcome beyond simply looking nice? We would be interested in seeing them...