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

Abstract

A useful starting point for designing advanced graphical user interfaces is the Visual Information-Seeking Mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on- demand. But this is only a starting point in trying to understand the rich and varied set of information visualizations that have been proposed in recent years. This paper offers a task by data type taxonomy with seven data types (1-, 2-, 3-dimensional data, temporal and multi-dimensional data, and tree and network data) and seven tasks (overview, zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history, and extract). Also cross-referenced as ISR-TR-96-66