Design-Specific Transformations in Visualization

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of design-specific transformations in visualization, integrating them into existing models to improve understanding, analysis, and reasoning about visualization properties and effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a new formalism that incorporates design-specific transformations into the visualization process, enhancing analysis and reasoning capabilities.

Findings

Highlights the role of design-specific transformations in visualization

Proposes a formalism integrating user tasks and data transformations

Enables analysis of visualization correctness and effectiveness

Abstract

In visualization, the process of transforming raw data into visually comprehensible representations is pivotal. While existing models like the Information Visualization Reference Model describe the data-to-visual mapping process, they often overlook a crucial intermediary step: design-specific transformations. This process, occurring after data transformation but before visual-data mapping, further derives data, such as groupings, layout, and statistics, that are essential to properly render the visualization. In this paper, we advocate for a deeper exploration of design-specific transformations, highlighting their importance in understanding visualization properties, particularly in relation to user tasks. We incorporate design-specific transformations into the Information Visualization Reference Model and propose a new formalism that encompasses the user task as a function over data. The resulting formalism offers three key benefits over existing visualization models: (1) describing task as compositions of functions, (2) enabling analysis of data transformations for visual-data mapping, and (3) empowering reasoning about visualization correctness and effectiveness. We further discuss the potential implications of this model on visualization theory and visualization experiment design.