InfoVis 2005 Contest

I'm impressed by InfoVis's contest. To encourage new visualisation techniques, they've got a contest challenge, complete with data set and questions to try to answer with your product solution. (This reminds me of the early days of speech and NLP research -- when shared datasets and competitive efforts combined with standard evaluation methods made for evolution in the field. You can't progress in a problem domain until you put some stakes in the ground, and get a lot of people working on precisely the same issue at the same time. And then evaluate those proposed solutions, by agreed upon criteria.)

This is the InfoVis 2005 Contest Call for Entries (due July 15); this is the description of the dataset and tasks for this year. For example:

1. Characterize correlations or other patterns among two or more variables in the data. For example:  
What products lead to growth in other products or industries? What contributes to companies moving, and what characterizes the moves?

2. Characterize clusters of products, industries, sales, regions, and/or companies. For example:  
What geographical areas developed in a similar manner or have similar characteristics? What product combinations tend to be produced by a company, or in a region?