|
Tools
Classification
Basics 101
While there are several ways to survey this range of
information visualization applications, perhaps the most fundamental method is
to categorize them by the underlying data types that the applications attempt to
visualize. This organization by data type, as outlined by Ben Shneiderman (Shneiderman,
1998), identifies seven data types:
One-dimensional
One-dimensional data is
simple, linear data, such as text or a list of figures. Probably the most
common form of one-dimensional data is a text document
Two-dimensional
In the context of
information visualization, two-dimensional data is data that consists of two
primary attributes that are represented in a space. Width and height represent
the size of an item, for example, and the placement of an item on an x-axis and
a y-axis represents a location in space.
The most common type of
two-dimensional data visualization is geographic map.
Three-dimensional
Three-dimensional data
goes beyond two-dimensional data by incorporating volume.
Multi-dimensional
Multi-dimensional data in
the context of information visualization is data that describes an item with
more than three attributes.
Temporal
Graphical displays of data
as it occurs over time is one of the most common and powerful methods of
visualizing information. the timeline as a basis for arranging data has become
common in a variety of commercial software programs. Project management tools
such as Microsoft Project use a timeline to enable the user to see at a glance
the duration of events, when events occur in relationship to each other, and
which events have dependencies on other events.
Hierarchical
Hierarchical, or tree,
data is data that has an inherent structure in which each item, or node, has a
single parent node .
The Windows Explorer
interface to the Windows Operating Systems filesystems, for instance, displays
the directory structure of a computer visually, enabling the user to more
quickly understand the structure and navigate to a particular node than a
text-based command-line interface.
Spatial
Spatial data types are
special data types needed to model geometry and to suitably represent geometric
data in database systems. For examples, point, line, region; partitions (maps),
graphs (networks) are examples of spatial data.
Network
Network data refers to
items (in some instances called nodes) that have relationships (links) to an
arbitrary number of other items.
|
