SpaceMaps for data visualisation
SpaceMapping is our software package for exploring complicated datasets in an interactive graphical manner. While plenty of tools allow for plotting and charting data, with new, complex and multi-leveled datasets it is not always clear what plot or charts are needed. SpaceMapping allows analysts to visualise a dataset interactively, in order to uncover hidden relationships.
Data visualisation is often presented as a means of communicating data and relationships to a reader and, as such represents a final output of analysis. Data can be plotted simply using bar or line charts, or made more interesting for istance with map-based displays (chorographs) to show data with geographic elements, or to use animation to show data with time-based elements.
It follows that the way data is displayed affects the way we understand it and how easy it is to see relationships and patterns within the data.
Our SpaceMapping visualisation software allows analysts and investigators to see the data in different ways and to see the data transition between different views, showing both data points and linkages within the data.
To give an example: in website analysis, each page has a number of visitors. Each visitor consists of a journey in terms of pages visited. The journeys represent links between the pages. And visits to each page changes according to time.
The website also has an internal structure in terms of links and connections between pages. A simple analysis is simply to plot bar charts per page in terms of number of visits, or per visitor in terms of number of pages viewed. This gives a static aggregate picture.
However, in practice, analysis might want to understand the relationship between the internal site structure and visitor journeys. How can the website better channel visitors to purchase, for instance? How do landing pages relate to exit pages? How do different segments work through the website?
SpaceMapping uses virtualised maps to show the data as points and links, and then allows the maps to be transformed with animation, for instance to group according to segment, or to place higher valued items closer together, or to identify islands and disconnects within the data.
Thus instead of a single viewpoint - often requiring coding or customised settings - SpaceMaps allows the data to be viewed in multiple different ways and so giving a way of exploring the information in animated visualisations, making it easier to spot relationships, discontinuities, outliers and trend data.
For more information on SpaceMapping for data visualisation contact info@dobney.com
