Monday, September 19, 2011

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

The author points out that the digital libraries that will be developed in the near future will enable convenient exploration of data. He also argues that with increased processing and capacity, visualizations will have a greater role. They can help in many tasks if not all to convey the data, patterns hidden inside the data, statistics. The author attributes it to the human visual bandwidth is greater than any of the other senses and this enables us to grasp data more effectively.


I agree with this point that the author makes because its a common experience especially with huge statistical data like server utilizations or metrics, that one would like to have data displayed as charts and graphs than text. I feel visualizations become efficient and usable when they provide an abstrated view of the data and then as the user demands for finer details, they expose the underlying details.

The article interests me the most in section 3 where it has introduced the seven data types and their tasks. It almost gives me an impression that the author has created a JAVA class of visualizations having seven data types and the following tasks on them. These tasks, I feel, are realistic and handy especially for large data sets where there is a lot of analysis required.

On the whole, the paper lays the foundation about various categories of visualizations and the ideal tasks that must be supported.

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