Visual representation of data

Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 1, 2010 at 10:37 PM

I would prefer visual tools that preserve spatial relationships in the plane. I find tools like The Brain hard to extract meaningful information from, because things move around, and the brain’s ability to remember spatial cues is lost. Spatial relationships can be, in themselves, metadata.

The problem then becomes that as your data relationships become more complex, you can only meaningfully represent a subset of your data in a single plane, which means that tools need to support multiple 2-D spatial views. I think Tinderbox does this relatively well.

I like MindManager’s layout algorithms too, as you can force the program to arrange items in certain kinds of spatial relationships, but the program’s tree-based data model is pretty darn limited.

It’s a shame there aren’t more spatial PIM tools. Mark Bernstein occasionally points to research papers on his blog discussing some pretty interesting spatial PIM tools, but they don’t seem to make it out of the lab very often.