For the two sentences below, would a semicolon work better to separate these two sentences?
Circle graphs, often called pie charts, are used to represent data with a relatively small number of categories. They illustrate how a whole is separated into parts.
Is this a case where both a period and a semicolon can work? The two sentences are independent but still related, so it seems reasonable to put a semicolon between them.
Here are two more sentences where a semicolon seems to work:
Sometimes data are collected to study two different variables in the same population of individuals or objects. Such data are called bivariate data.