We at Rapid-I definitely believe that appropriate visualizations of data are often much more important than the best models describing those data. For exactly that reason we implemented about 30 high-dimensional plotters which will be discussed in the blog during the next months .

One strong concept which will become more and more important as data analysis is transferred to computers is the concept of animation. Everybody knows that by looking at a 3D plot on a 2D screen. You can not identify the exact location of the data points without moving them a little bit around, for example by slowly rotating the plot. Every user of the 3D plotter of RapidMiner probably knows this phenomenon.

But there is a different and probably more intuitive possibility for using animations, namely in order to express changes over time.  You can try this yourself with the great Gapminder website : 

You can select from an amazing amount of socio-economic data about almost all countries  of the world and define nice looking bubble charts as well as animations which show the changes over time.

Check out for example the CO2 emissions since 1820 (example above) or the Wealth & Health of Nations . Click the "Play" button on the lower left in order to start the animation.

A strong plot should be clean and easy and in the best case people can understand what's displayed by just viewing it without any additional information. The Gapminder people implemented this almost perfectly: the user interface is simple and intuitive and still it's powerful, the meaning of every axis as well of every visual concept is explained directly within the plot. Thanks for this great - and interesting - service!