Regardless of the delivery mechanism or viewing technology, the core of BI is the presentation of meaningful information in a concise and efficient manner.
To illustrate some inventive solutions, I searched for actual or simulated biological systems. I looked for time-lapse predator/prey models or bacterial culture growth. In explaining the movement of thought leaders through topic space in a social network, I wanted to find flocking behaviour. For something close, particle systems like Boids are a good base.
A great site aggregating some exciting work in visualisation is Visual Complexity. The closest bacterial analogy was an animation of HIV transmission pathways. This example shows perfectly a different way of illustrating growth of networks/relationships over time using a time-lapse animation technique.
Representing relationships between geospatial points is becoming increasingly important. If you use point to point lines, the information gets lost quickly. The technique of edge bundling assists in grouping and colouring relationships to extract meaning.
It is usual to limit spatial visualisation techniques to geospatial representation. It is possible to describe a topic related abstract space to assist in visualising multidimensional data which has no geospatial dimension. A tool for performing this in the context of library borrowings grouped by Dewey classification shows the power of this method.
Dewey based visualisation of library borrowings
Continuing on the abstract space theme, hierarchical edge bundling allows for representing relationships spatially.
Perhaps the best example bringing all this together, and relevant to the Global Financial Crisis, is a timelapse Flash animation of
US trade deficits from 1998 to 2008.
