<s>[INST] I would like to begin by drawing a small ‘dataset’ using an example of collecting data from a population of dogs in the community.

For my dataset, I want to focus on the dog’s characteristics, such as size, age, breed, coat colour, whether the dog is spayed/neutered, and the dog’s weight.

However, unlike a traditional dataset, which is usually stored in an excel spreadsheet with each piece of data in a column, I don’t want my data to be presented that way.

Instead, I’m looking for a format that showcases the ‘groupings’ of certain characteristics, which would otherwise be in individual columns in a spreadsheet.

I describe this as an ‘ecosystem’ of characteristics. The goal is to gather a dataset, presented in a very holistic manner, similar to how characteristics in nature agree within various groupings - and I believe this is an evolving or holistic approach to collecting and presenting data.

Perhaps one could use mind mapping or similar visuals to create this holistic approach to show how these groupings or ecosystems of characteristics interact with each other.

To summarize - I want to start with a small population of dogs (around 30) and to look for groupings or 'clusterings' of certain characteristics - and represent them as a holistic web of relationships within these groupings, rather than just showing individual data in a traditional column format.

Are there any methods or theories I could use to approach this task, and does it sound like something that data visualization or information architecture could help with?[/INST]