Personally, I think that information visualisation is one of the areas where we will find a lot of useful innovation in the coming years. Now that so much data is gathered, it's quite obvious that we need new ways to represent all this data in useful ways. I came across a project of MIT called SIMILE that aims to develop robust, open source tools based on Semantic Web technologies that improve access, management and reuse among digital assets. Two of their applications drew my attention,
Timeline and
Timeplot. Timeline and Timeplot are AJAX-based widgets that display time-based events. Just like in Google Maps you can scroll across information, only now it's a timeline instead of a map. You can see how activities took place in a certain amount of time. I can immediately imagine the potential of these kind of visualizations for complex legal cases where much depends on the order of events. This is so much better than a lot of text, you can scroll and click on any item to see the indepth information. More of these examples!
EXTRA FIELD-5:Information visualization