Tasks for Temporal Graph Visualisation

TL;DR

This paper extends a task taxonomy framework to temporal graph visualization, providing a comprehensive list of over 144 attribute-based tasks for exploratory data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces an extended task framework specifically tailored for temporal graph data, filling a gap in existing visualization taxonomies.

Findings

Developed a detailed task taxonomy for temporal graph visualization.

Extended the Andrienko framework to relational, temporal graph data.

Produced a comprehensive list of 144+ task variations.

Abstract

In [1], we describe the design and development of a task taxonomy for temporal graph visualisation. This paper details the full instantiation of that task taxonomy. Our task taxonomy is based on the Andrienko framework [2], which uses a systematic approach to develop a formal task framework for visual tasks specifically associated with Exploratory Data Analysis. The Andrienko framework is intended to be applicable to all types of data, however, it does not consider relational (graph) data. We therefore extended both their data model and task framework for temporal graph data, and instantiated the extended version to produce a comprehensive list of tasks of interest during exploratory analysis of temporal graph data. As expected, our instantiation of the framework resulted in a very large task list; with more than 144 variations of attribute based tasks alone, it is too large to fit in a standard journal paper, hence we provide the detailed listing in this document.