Patent ID: 7265755

Claim:
A method in a computer system for automatically presenting a dynamic visualization of data in a multi-dimensional space of greater than three dimensions, the data having a plurality of attributes, comprising: receiving a plurality of mappings of data attributes to visualization dimensions, wherein the visualization dimensions include at least one appearance dimension, a plurality of spatial dimensions, and at least one sequencing dimension; determining a plurality of data entities from the data, each data entity associated with a portion of the data; and for each determined data entity, at a time of visualization of the data, automatically and dynamically generating a series of representations of the data entity in the multi-dimensional space and automatically and dynamically presenting the generated series of representations, the representations based upon values of each of the data attributes of the data associated with the data entity that have been mapped to the appearance, spatial, and sequencing dimensions, to portray changes in the data entity over values of the sequencing dimension so that trends in the data can be identified.