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Institute for Informatics and Digital InnovationEdinburgh Napier University
INFORMATION VISUALISATION
WHAT
What is Information Visualisation (IV)?
Visual encoding of abstract information to allow visual exploration /detection of patterns
Can be used in tandem with statistical approaches
WHY
Humans have a well-developed visual system, so take advantage of its pattern-detecting facilities
Also some people just don’t trust data until “they see it with their own eyes”, or are uncomfortable with statistical measures
WHY
Finding patternsMPG and Weight negatively correlated
Horsepower and Weight positively correlated
WHY
Finding outliers / errorsLow weight but rubbish fuel economy
DATA STRUCTURES
Information is abstract i.e. non-physically rooted
Examples include
Family trees
Share prices
Social networks
Tuple data
INTERACTION TECHNIQUES
IV applications allow users to interact with the data, as opposed to being static screenshots (cf GraphViz)
Common techniques beyond the basics include Filtering – removing, reordering and re-rendering
according to selected subsets of information
Linking – viewing the same data (and same filters) in different views
Focusing – visual effects such as non-linear focus+context and zoom to accentuate areas of the visualisation
Speed of response is vital, recommend < 50ms
INTERACTION TECHNIQUES
Filtering works on a data set by interactively reducing the number of items that fit in the selected set.
Here a house sale set of 30,000+ records is cut down to under 2,000 using the sliders on the columns.
INTERACTION TECHNIQUES
Focusing works by giving more space to items of interest, but still retaining the ‘context’ of the unselected objects.
Here the selected items in blue have increased in size.
INTERACTION TECHNIQUES
Linking works by having data viewed simultaneously in different visualisations
The linking may also apply to selections and filters
Linking is closely associated with MVC architectures for separating UI and Model data. Use the same model data in multiple UI components.
WHERE
Games Developers have two opportunities for using IV
In the course of their work Workflow analyses
Software dependencies
In the game Attractive effects
User attention
Eick et al – SeeSoft – Developer tracker - 1992
SOFTWARE VISUALISATION
Software visualisation – one of the first topics explored by visualisation researchers – fixing their own problems first
Telea & Auber – CodeFlows SVN Visualisation - 2009
Van Ham – Call Matrices – Method Call Graphs - 2003
SOFTWARE VISUALISATION
CHISEL group – Creole – Call & Method graph - 2007
Stand alone tools are very well, but integrating them into IDEs such as Eclipse makes them more useful (and more likely to be used)
Malnati – XRay – Package dependencies - 2008
LIBRARIES
Developing visualisations can be time-consuming
Developer Libraries Integrate common vis techniques into existing
programs / websites (Prefuse, InfoVis Cyberinfrastructure)
End User Libraries Drop data into visualisation (ManyEyes. Mondrian)
THE END
Some demos at the CISS Napier website
http://www.ciss.soc.napier.ac.uk/
Q’s