Patent US 6,202,068

A method for efficiently and expediently searching a database so that large quantities of data may be visualized to reveal and readily identify underlying patterns and/or obscure, latent relationships among the individual data elements, comprising: selecting a particular aspect of relationship information; scanning the data items and their associated information to determine the existence of the selected aspect of relationship information; selecting an object data item from the data items; grouping a plurality of data items related to the object data item into a specific group having a defined relationship with at least one other related data item contained within the specific group; identifying each data item contained within the same group as the object data item; tallying the magnitude associated with the selected aspect of relationship information for each data item with respect to every other data item in the database; and mapping the object data item and the other data items identified as being contained within the same group as the object data item onto a Cartesian coordinate, thus generating an image for display.