A BBC video presents a number of visualization techniques.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/five-charts-that-changed-the-world/p0fb69c1   Two of which are particularly interesting for displaying complex technical and intellectual property data.

The first of these is the Coxcomb chart. It’s a stacked form of a pie chart, and visually much easier to understand than stacked bar charts displaying the same information. An example is shown in the figure. This particular graphic was developed by Florence Nightingale.  She used this graphic to convince the Crown that hospitals were desperately needed to improve Britain’s outcome in their war effort.

Second interesting chart was developed by Ed Hawkins. This graphic uses colored bands to fill in the areas under a line chart to indicate deviation from average.  In the example shown in the Figure, global temperature change was used on the y-axis and time on the x-axis.

The graphic was further simplified to just be a colored vertical line square as shown in the third Figure.  In this instance no axis is provided. In spite of the lack of textual information or labeled axes, most people intuitively understand meaning from such a colored tapestry graph.