Abstract

While the field of visualization has progressed immensely towards supporting
data analysis tasks in the past decade, the discussion on the use of the third dimension
in visual spaces for reflecting data has encountered both objections and support
along the way. However, the advance of mapping techniques and interaction
approaches have brought new light into the possibilities to use 3D views for cases
where the number of dimensions actually makes a difference for the user. In that
context, landscape views have too long being overlooked as a tool for exploration.
While surfaces are mathematically bi-dimensional, the use of the third coordinate
plane to express elements poses additional charges to the visual system, such as
occlusion and challenges interacting with the layout. In this work we revisit landscape
views in the light of recent advances in visualizations of high-dimensional
data, which have provided better ways to create bi-dimensional mappings (such as
evolved multidimensional scaling algorithms) and to summarize sets of data (such
as word clouds and image mosaics). These advances provide additional clues to
the user so that the landscape view is capable of both offering an overall view
of the data set and suggesting entry points for further exploration of subspaces
of interest. This article presents a number of strategies to accomplish a better
surface data visualization and illustrates applications of the approach that reflect
its potential use in real life cases. Our contribution includes methods to cluster
and segment a projection, and recursive divisions of the visual space enriched by
textures, which have various uses in multidimensional visualization and analysis
tasks.

Bibtex

@INCOLLECTION{siqueira2015Landscape,
  AUTHOR =       {Pedro Henrique Siqueira and Guilherme Pimentel Telles and Rosane Minghim},
  TITLE =        {Revisiting Landscape Views in Information Visualization},
  editor =       {Bruno Lopes and Talita Perciano},
  BOOKTITLE =    {Learning and Infering. Festschrift for Alejandro C. Frery on the Occasion of his 55th Birthday},
  chapter =      {},
  pages =        {131-152},
  address =      {London-UK},
  PUBLISHER =    {College Publications},
  YEAR =         {2015},
  edition =      {1},
  isbn =         {1848901712},
  DOI =          {},
}

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