Using Frequency Tag Clouds in Error Identification

Word cloud showing barley pedigree data.

Word clouds sometimes get a hard time (and sometimes justifiably so) but they have functionality that makes them an effective way to look for errors in large textual-based datasets.

In this example we used the online word cloud based service Wordle http://www.wordle.net/ after running a Perl program over as much pedigree data as we could gather on commercial National List trialed barley cultivars pulling out counts of the number of times a particular cultivar is mentioned. This gives an overall indication of the relative importance of a variety in the UK breeding process in that is shows which cultivars have been most widely bred from.

Some other image showing a word cloud.