Visualising complex data & Relationship oriented computing

Methods of visualizing complex data sets is an interest of mine—perhaps a throwback from my Geomatics studies.

When I was at University we used a 3D GIS system on a Silicon Graphics workstation. You wore LCD based 3D glasses which synced via infrared to the screen (displaying alternate angles on every screen refresh). Navigation was provided by a horible HID (human input device) called a rat. It was very non-intuitive.

I was also facinated by Apple's attempt to present a 3D view of the complex relationships of Internet content, but navigable in 2D. Known variously as Project X and HotSauce, the data format was trialled by a number of companies including Yahoo, who provided the ability to "fly" through their 'Net index with the Apple tool. It was one of the many cool things to come from Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) that was discarded never to be seen again.

I recently became aware of a new open source Java library that helps you present various types of 2D navigation of your complex (possibly multi-dimensional) data called prefuse You can view some cool java applet demo's and download the code from http://prefuse.sourceforge.net/

(Thanks to forresto on the "Related projects" mailing list of the touchgraph sourceforge project : http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/ for mailing the link to prefuse).

A very interesting use of prefuse is Vizster—a project by Professor Marti Hearst of the University of California, Berkeley (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jheer/infovis/final/).

Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com, tribe.net, and orkut.

PS: Sorry for the inconsistant spelling of visualising / visualizing - I just wanted to make sure all English speakers could find this page with a search tool.