Review: A Better Look Into RelationshipsReview: A Better Look Into Relationships

The means to encode quantitative data values using the visual attributes of proximity (that is, the distance between entities as a measure of relatedness), line thickness (the thicker the connector line the stronger the relationship), size (the bigger the entity, the bigger the value), and color (a scale of light to dark to indicate increasing value).

The means to easily toggle the text labels of entities and links on and off, ideally all together and per entity or link type.

The means to easily toggle on and off the display of entities that aren't linked by selected types of relationships. For example, if I want to see only a company and its competitors, I'd like to filter on competitor links only and watch all companies that aren't competitors disappear from the display.

The means to choose the order in which entities are automatically sorted in the View Area based on their properties or link types. For example, sort company entities by the property of total sales revenue or sort Web page entities by internal versus external links.

Slider controls for dynamic data filtering based on the value ranges of key properties, such as company revenue.

A "focus + context" display in the View Area so that the big picture isn't lost while local data is being examined. This display could involve some form of automatic entity aggregation to reduce the visual space required by data outside of the focus area.

The display of time as an animation (either manually or automatically controlled) to visualize change.