I had a similar situation except that I wasn't as smart as you to consider books in the first place. But, I did use some really good tools. I highly recommend

I had a similar situation except that I wasn't as smart as you to consider books in the first place. But, I did use some really good tools. I highly recommend using Prefuse (yes, it's java but it ships with great examples and it's open source). If you like prefuse, then try flare (actionscript based). As far I know, prefuse supports querying from tables (my data backend was postgres). Here's prefuse: http://prefuse.org/ http://prefuse.org/ Here's flare:http://flare.prefuse.org/ http://flare.prefuse.org/ And for a dash of inspiration and more ideas: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/