I’ve been playing with inductive clustering of digital reference questions. To this point I’ve been visualizing this in 2D, but I have been keeping track of three dimensions.
I’ve discovered a great little development application distributes as part of it’s developer package called Quartz Composer. It uses a visual programming language to directly tap into Apple’s graphics architecture. It’s inputs aren’t too rich, but I managed to get MySQL data dumped into it using RSS. While it seems a bit of a kludge, it works pretty well.
Here’s an animated GIF showing the digital transactions clustering in 3D:
Here is a quick MPEG movie showing how you can fly around the cluster at any point. What you’ll see is a screen capture of me moving around using the keyboard and mouse:
Here’s just a pretty rotating movie of a small subset of the data: