One of my favourite magazine, the German c’t, has recently published a story on the visualization of complex information. The article contains a lots of interesting links to information visualization sites that I would like to share with you. Thanks to André Kramer who has written this excellent article. Information design offers a lot of interesting insights for knowledge managers. Please have a look:

• The visualcomplexity.com site offers more than 600 examples of information design. Of them, nearly 100 belong to the “knowledge networks” domain.
• Andrew Wande Moere, a senior lecturer of the University of Sydney, offers information design example on a continuous basis in his blog information aesthetics.
• Chris Harrison has also collected some interesting visualization projects.
• Have you ever wondered how a chess computer thinks? Just try it out with Thinking Machine 4.
• The Cyberspace Atlas offers various views on internet’s visualizations.
• The Twingly Screensaver shows new blog entries just in time on the globe.
• The TouchGraph Navigator visualizes relational information (free software).
• WinDirStat is a treemap file explorer. Each file is represented by a colored rectangle.
• LiquiFile could be the file explorer of the next generation. The good news is that the inventor is based in Germany. The bad news is that’s available for Mac only.
• I’m not sure if somebody will like AnyMails. To treat each mail as a microbe with different shape and size is certainly an interesting methaphor, yet not so viable in daily life. The same applies to the tree icon as a new way to show the age and size of files.
• Who ever wonders what top managers think about in tough times may have a look at the EnronExplorer. The 200′000 e-mail archive offers insight into the lives and preoccupations of Enron’s top executives during the 1999 – 2002 period.
• Last but not least Gapminder shows really astonishing relationships that debunk myths thanks to historic statistical data. The powerful visualization combines three types of data in one chart plus the timeline for each combination of countries in the world. Hans Rosling offers the most useful information design tool (see video).

Faceted search (& classification) combined with visualization offers an user-friendly way to quickly find relevant information assets in thousands of objects across multiple systems. Moreover, it’s also possible to identify patterns while combining facets.
The QlikView Wine Guide is a good example of an useful faceted search application. Which cheap and excellent wine would fit to antipasti? What is the wine flavor of a country? Questions that are easily answered with this (demo) application. Another company that excels in faceted search is Endeca – though they don’t offer a real life demo, but the “guided summarization demo” is well made. SAP and Intel invested about 15 millions in Endeca four months ago. Siderean is also a company to watch that promotes “relational navigation” and is part of Oracle’s partner landscape.

Imagine that you would like to plan a two-week travel by car to Corsica with your kids. I tried to “unleash” the power of travel 2.0 communities, but eventually I got the best results via the “old fashioned” way of web 1.0 sites and an excellent travel guide. Why doesn’t the travel 2.0 sites deliver what I would have expected? So, I would have expected more than 10,000 online reviews of touristic sites in Corsica (6.4 millions overnight stays à 14 days and 3 people per trip = 152,000 trips. Of them, 70% of the people with Internet accounts and the usual active contributor ratio of 1% for the web = 1,066 published trips per year. Each trip with about 10 “moments of truth” worth an online publication.).
So, which are the main obstacles?
1. There are “tons” of social networks dedicated to travelling: TripAdvisor.com (5,000,000 members) / VirtualTourist.com (1,000,000) / Qype.com (500,000) / TripsByTips.de (250,000) / Travellerspoint.com (140,000) / Globosapiens.com (20,000) / Globalzoo.de (3,000) and dozens more… So, where is the unified search to look for the specific info you need in order to plan a travel? I am looking forward for the next generation of the web to get other the info silos created by web 1.0 and 2.0 technologies. The question that each person who would like to share her/his travel experience has to answer: where I’m going to publish it?
2. Most of the travel social networks are either large and focus on “standard” features (e.g. hotels & restaurants reviews) or are rather small and limited in the coverage of sites around the globe. Hence, if you travel to sites that are off the beaten track you will get only fractions of the info compared to the “hot spots”.
So, do you think that the “mushrooming” of travel 2.0 sites will soon come to an end and what is your experience with travel 2.0 sites?

Samantha Starmer, Information Architect bei Microsoft, führt in einem kurzen Artikel des Bulletins der American Society for Information Science and Technology die fünf wichtigsten Erfolgsfaktoren auf, um Information Architecture gegenüber dem Management zu verkaufen. Eine gleichnamige Powerpoint-Präsentation befindet sich auf den Seiten des IA Summits 2006.

Täglich neue Infos aus der weiten Welt des Information Designs unter informationdesign.org. Eine lohnenswerte Lektüre.