Over at Visual-Literacy.org , Ralph Lengler and Martin Eppler have published this great Periodic Table of methods of visualisation. This displays around 100 diagram types, with examples and a multi-faceted classification by:
In this application I have borrowed the list of diagrams to create an alternative interface, partly as an exericise in XML processing with XQuery and the eXist native XML database, on whose site this is currently hosted.. There is an entry in the DSA Module Blog which describes the process of scaping the file to get this data.
Methods can be categorised in various ways. The Periodic table shows several categorisations in the same graphic, but there are other ways to categorise, and hence find a method.. To support an exercise with my students, I've created a very simple application for a viewer to group methods and give the group a tag. Later I will look at doing something with these groups, such as a tag cloud.