Data Trees Presenting Complex Data

Data that already exists can be a useful source for researchers, provided that the mining or collecting of the data is undertaken with a clear understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the information gathered and analysed. Analysing existing data adds to the knowledge that has already been acquired, and in some cases may 'pull together' knowledge. Government departments' national and international organisations collect large amounts of data that could be used for research purposes. Mining data provides trends and patterns that are very complex, and, finding a method to present this data, for publication to a broad readership, can be challenging. This article reports on the use of data trees as a representation for presenting data extracted from large data sets and presents a concise model for publication.