Circos: Taking Data Vis Inspiration from the world of Genomics

http://circos.ca/software/roadmap/

Could be especially useful for visualizing migration, or exceptionally large data.

As a whole it came to my attention from something a little more stripped down- this “map” of human migration in the United States. http://www.wired.com/2013/11/mapping-migration-without-a-map/

It seems to be suited towards analysis that pertains to flow, and relationships that describe things in an nXn matrix with values for each intersection. 

http://circos.ca/intro/general_data/

This link talks a little about the kind of data that might make sense, and it has an example at the bottom of it being used in conjunction with some mapping. The sub-sections of the circular charts that are a little more detailed and less of a fine web might be a better example of how it could be used.

http://circos.ca/tutorials/images/small/ And here’s a section that’s a tutorial that deals with creating different kinds of images.

I haven’t looked into it deeply, but it looks like it’s based on Perl, which I’m not very familiar with, but it appears that someone has come up with an R package that mimics it, which is an interesting thought-

Some documentation below:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RCircos/index.html

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RCircos/vignettes/Using_RCircos.pdf

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RCircos/RCircos.pdf

This is a similarly beautiful, and apparently useful visualization tool for networks by the same designer:

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/linnet/