When a network is the wrong picture
A trade relationship involves a municipality, a product, a country, a period and the signals that affect it. Five edges lose what one hyperedge keeps.
Pairwise networks are the default picture of an ecosystem, and they are often wrong. A public tender links an agency, several suppliers, a category and a date. A patent links inventors, an applicant, a classification and a filing office. Decomposing these into edges destroys the fact that they happened together.
POLIS's hypergraph panels keep the higher-order relation intact: municipality × country × product chapter, scored by trade value, carrying PESTEL dimensions. The question the visualisation answers changes from 'who is connected to whom' to 'which configurations exist and which are changing'.