Monday, September 19, 2011

Reaction: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Role of Interaction in Information Visualization

Information Visualization systems, has two core components: representation and interaction. This paper emphasizes the importance of its relatively neglected component, Interaction.

I agree with the authors' point that, interaction with the information in right ways, will help the users' to gain in-depth understanding, and will help their process of cognition.

Though there are several ways and techniques using which we can interact with the information, the authors made an effort to classify the interaction techniques based on the notion of user intent. The seven categories of classification are: Select, Explore, Reconfigure, Encode, Abstract/Elaborate, Filter and Connect. A brief illustration of each of these categories is provided, which is quite informative.

As authors have rightly pointed, there might be some interaction techniques which might not fall in any of these categories. I think the user-intent based categorization is the right way of categorization, and the authors have laid a foundation stone for research in this direction, and established a meaningful jargon to come up with several holistic frameworks of interaction based on the user-intent.

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