A design space of visualization tasks

Note

A taxonomy for data visualization tasks. The author defines the design space dimensions as:

• Goal: Exploratory Analysis (e.g. undirected search), Confirmatory Analysis (directed search), Presentation (exhibiting confirmed analysis results) 
• Means: Navigation (e.g. browsing or searching), (Re-)organization (e.g. extraction, abstraction), Relation (e.g. variations, discrepancies)
• Characteristics: Low-level (e.g. values, objects) & High-level (e.g. trends, outliers, clusters, frequency, distribution, correlation, etc.) data characteristics
• Target: Attribute Relations (e.g. Temporal and Spatial relations), Structural relation (e.g. causal relations, topological relations)
• Cardinality: Single (highlight detail), Multiple (putting data into context), and All Instances (getting the overview). 

The classification can be used as the semantic tuple, i.e. (exploratory, search, trend, attrib(variable), all). This tuple is used to calculate the suitable techniques.

Reference

1. Schulz, Hans-Jörg, et al. "A design space of visualization tasks." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19.12 (2013): 2366-2375.