How to create a pie chart of non-hierarchical relationships with D3.js?

Question

I am trying to create a diagram that shows links between nodes at the same hierarchy level, but with different groups in a circular layout. This is basically a visualization of keywords / tags / groups attached to objects a la Circos :

var data = [ { "name": "Adam", "tags": ["tall", "blonde"] }, { "name": "Barbara", "tags": ["tall", "brunette", "student", "single"] } ]; 

Or, like what I'm trying to do:

 var data = [ { "name": "Project 1", "categories": [ "Category A", "Category B", "Category C", "Category D" ] }, { "name": "Project 2", "categories": [ "Category C", "Category D", "Category E" ] }, { "name": "Project 3", "categories": [ "Category A", "Category E" ] }, { "name": "Project 4", "categories": [ "Category A", "Category C", "Category D", "Category E" ] }, { "name": "Project 5", "categories": [ "Category A", "Category B", "Category D" ] } ]; 

Each object can have several categories corresponding to the number of node copies appearing in the circle. Visually, it should look something like this:

Is this possible with D3.js? If so, which layout? It looks like this would be between chord (but without values) and bundle (without hierarchy).

I would suggest that the script will need to go through the JSON data and first find all the unique categories, and then distribute and bind the nodes of each object depending on how many and how many categories are attached to it. Finally, this will denote each category.

Any ideas would be appreciated.