GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-96-25
Title:
The Information Mural: Increasing Information Bandwidth in Visualizations
Authors:
Dean F. Jerding
John T. Stasko
Abstract:
Information visualizations must allow users to browse information spaces
and focus quickly on items of interest. Being able to see some
representation of the entire information space provides an initial
gestalt overview and gives context to support browsing and
search tasks. However, the limited number of pixels on the screen constrain
the information bandwidth and make it difficult to completely display
large information spaces. The Information Mural is a two-dimensional,
reduced representation of an entire information space that fits entirely
within a display window or screen. The mural creates a miniature
version of the information space using visual attributes such as
grayscale shading, intensity, color, and pixel size, along with
anti-aliased compression techniques. Information Murals can be used as
stand-alone visualizations or in global navigational views. We have
built several prototypes to demonstrate the use of Information Murals in
visualization applications; subject matter for these views includes
computer software, scientific data, text documents, and geographic
information.
Keywords:
Information visualization, software visualization, data visualization
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