Database Reference
In-Depth Information
have to be made, such as conversion of the data; and finally during a session a
user makes costs
C
e
, because he has to spend time to watch and understand the
visualization, and interactively explore the data set. The overall profit now is
F
=
nm
(
W
(
∆K
)
−
C
s
−
kC
e
)
−
C
i
−
nC
u
.
In other words, this leads to the obvious insight that a great visualization method
is used by many people, who use it routinely to obtain highly valuable knowledge,
while having to spend little time and money on hardware, software, and effort.
And also, no alternatives that are more cost-effective should be available.
In the original paper a number of examples of more or less successful visual-
ization methods are given, viewed in terms of this model. One InfoVis application
was considered: SequoiaView, a tool to visualize the contents of a hard disk, us-
ing cushion treemaps [28]. The popularity of this tool can be explained from
the concrete and useful insights obtained, as well as the low costs in all respects
associated with its application.
When we consider InfoVis in general, we can also come to positive conclu-
sions for almost all parameters, and hence predict a bright future for our field.
The number of potential users is very large. Data in the form of tables, hier-
archies, and networks is ubiquitous, as well as the need to get insight in these.
This holds for professional applications, but also for private use at home. Many
people have a need to get an overview of their email, financial transfers, media
collections, and to search in external data bases, for instance to find a house,
vacation destination, or another product that meets their needs. Methods and
techniques from InfoVis, in the form of separate tools or integrated in custom
applications, can be highly effective here to provide such overviews. Also, many
of these activities will be repeated regularly, hence both
are high. The
growing field of Casual InfoVis [19] further illustrates how InfoVis techniques
are becoming more common in people's everyday lives.
The costs
n
and
m
C
e
that have to be made to understand visualizations depend on
the prior experience of the users as well as the complexity of the imagery shown.
On the positive side, the use of graphics to show data is highly familiar, and
bar-charts, pie-charts, and other forms of business graphics are ubiquitous. On
the other hand, one should not overestimate familiarity. The scatterplot seems
to be at the boundary: Considered as trivial in the InfoVis community, but too
hard to understand (if the horizontal axis does not represent time) by a lay-
audience, according to Matthew Ericson, deputy graphics director of the New
York Times in his keynote presentation at IEEE InfoVis 2007. Visual literacy is
an area where more work can be done, but on the other hand, InfoVis does have
a strong edge compared to non-visual methods here. And, there are examples of
areas where complex visual coding has been a great success, with the invention
of the script as prime example.
The costs
C
u
per user can be reduced by tight integration
with applications. The average user will not be interested in producing visual-
izations, her focus will be on solving her own problem, where visualization is one
of the means to this end. Separate InfoVis tools are useful for specialists, which
C
s
per session and
Search WWH ::
Custom Search