I have always had a fascination for the Data Visualization capabilities of all the tools and technologies I have worked with. For example: I worked with Oracle Graphics 2.0, back in 1994, and liked it! Fast forwarding through the years – I am now wetting my appetite with ADF’s Data Visualization Tags (DVT) – an impressive array of graphs, gauges, charts and other ways of visualizing data.

One interesting type of graph that I have not actually used before, is the Radar Chart. It is an interesting type of visualization that can plot in one graph values for multiple series against multiple dimensions and make it easy to compare them (the series) with one another. Granted, you can do something similar with a multi-series line chart, yet the comparison is somewhat more pronounced in the radar graph.

See for example the next graph. It plots values for three series – each serie represents a region in the world. For each of the tracks at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2011 conference, the percentage of sessions in the track delivered by presenters from the region represented by a serie is plotted. Thus we can see that over 90% of the sessions in the BI and Oracle EPM track is delivered by More >