categorization

Time is a complex dimension, especially when trying to visualize it. In the last ten years a lot of approaches to display and interact with temporal data have been published. They range from linear timeline visualizations to novel ideas employing visual metaphors and even clustering techniques to support the user in exploring large-scale data sets. The diversity of the proposed methods has raised the awareness that a common categorization needs to be defined to efficiently evaluate the usability and interactivity of information visualization tools.

Therefore, this work aims at giving a detailed overview of the possibilities and problems of current information visualization tools by applying a recently published categorization. A data set containing air pollution data measured in the years 2002 to 2006 at five different measurement stations in Great Britain is displayed with each of them. To enhance the judgement of the visualization tools, tasks that cover different areas of practical work are defined and carried out. After this practical part the categorization is applied to all of the examined applications. Both the task accomplishment and the use of the categorization are then reflected and occurred problems are described. Possible improvements are pointed out and future research areas are mentioned.