Monday, September 19, 2011

Reaction: The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations


This is a basic article which proposes a 'type by task taxonomy (TTT)' of infoviz. Here the author categorizes the visualizations in seven data types and defines seven tasks to be performed on the visualizations. The author underlines the Visual Information Seeking mantra to be 'Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand'.

The author has described the data types at a very introductory level without much in-depth discussion. The examples given are good, but inclusion of some images and figures could have made the understanding easier. The article explains tasks like Overview, zoom and filter that are basic but probably the most important. The article also draws attention to consider the tasks of history and extracts as important part of Information visualization.

The end of the article however, seems to lose the track and fails to reach a firm conclusion. That part could have been better utilized to reinforce the relationship between the data types and tasks.

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