The design space of construction tools for information visualization: A survey

Abstract

Information visualization has been widely used to convey information from data and assist communication. There are enormous needs of efficient visualization design for users from diverse fields to leverage the power of data. As a result, emerging construction tools for information visualization focus on providing solutions with different aspects including expressiveness, accessibility, and efficiency. In this paper, we review existing works on declarative specifications and user interfaces for visualization construction. By summarizing their methods for producing information visualizations and efforts on improving usability, we express the design patterns in terms of a design space which describes the tools in several different aspects. We discuss how the design space can be applied to support further exploration of potential research topics in the future.

Introduction

In the past decade, the ability to capture data has been dramatically enhanced with the raising of the internet of things, intelligent industry, and sensors for urban data monitoring. Practitioners in all fields, including scientists, analysts, journalists, and designers, have realized the importance of data and data analysis. Concurrently with this trend, information visualization has been widely used as an effective means to convey insights in data and a medium for communication and collaboration [1]. End-users in a variety of fields come up with their needs for efficient visualization authoring tools. For the various demands emerged, enormous construction tools for information visualization have been developed under several different considerations.

Visualizations may be utilized in many different ways. It can be a report presenting for the manager, a method for displaying simulations for a scientist, or a fancy graph for sharing personal behaviors on the social network. Users choose different tools with respect to the data to import, goals for creating visualizations, and their expertise in information visualization. On the other hand, researchers and developers make their efforts to provide efficient tools oriented to people from diverse backgrounds, balancing among effectiveness, accessibility, and efficiency.

In this paper, we present a design space to describe different aspects of construction tools for information visualization. Through such design space, we summarize and classify existing tools for designing and authoring information visualization. Based on this, we can locate blank spaces among current works and make suggestions for future researches. To provide a systematic and complete design space coverage, we not only reviewed the research papers of visualization construction tools, but also researches that construct a paradigm or methodology of creating information visualizations and interactions. Moreover, this paper may refer to some other surveys, taxonomies, and pipeline models.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we define a design space of visualization construction tools for information visualization tools. The definition of a conceptually complete and consistent design space can help readers to rapidly locate the visualization construction tools, for the use of choosing suitable tools for creating or rapid prototyping of new construction tools. Second, by discussing the dimensions of defined design space and some novel features discovered from tools surveyed, we figure out some existing problems on designing construction tools and on utilizing them to create visualizations. Furthermore, we make suggestions for potential research directions based on the survey.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces background knowledge and previous researches on the categorization of visualization construction tools. Section 3 proposes the dimensions of our design space and the classification of reviewed works. In Section 4, we discuss the issues discovered in defining the design space and make suggestions for future research directions. Finally, Section 5 is the conclusion.