Book Overview
Time is an exceptional dimension that is common to many application domains such as medicine, engineering, business, science, biography, history, planning, or project management. Understanding time-oriented data enables us to learn from the past in order to predict, plan, and build the future. Due to the distinct characteristics of time, appropriate visual and analytical methods are required to explore and analyze them.
This book starts with an introduction to visualization and a number of historical examples of visual representations. At its core, the book presents and discusses a systematic view of the visualization of time-oriented data. This view is structured along three key questions. While the aspects of time and associated data describe what is being visualized, user tasks are related to the question why something is visualized. These characteristics and tasks determine how the visualization is to be designed. To support visual exploration, interaction techniques and analytical methods are required as well, which are discussed in separate chapters. The concepts explained in this book are illustrated with numerous examples.
A large part of this book is devoted to a structured survey of existing techniques for visualizing time and time-oriented data. Overall, 101 different visualization techniques are presented on a per-page basis; each of these self-contained descriptions is accompanied by an illustration and corresponding references. This survey serves as a reference for scientists conducting related research as well as for practitioners seeking information on how their time-oriented data can best be visualized in order to gain valuable insights.
About the Authors
Wolfgang Aigner
is lecturer at St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences, Austria and senior researcher at the Institute of Software Technology & Interactive Systems at Vienna University of Technology, Austria. He is an expert in Information Visualization (InfoVis) and Visual Analytics (VA), particularly in the context of time-oriented data. Wolfgang served as reviewer and program committee member for various scientific conferences, symposia, and journals, and acted as co-chair and advisor for scientific workshops. Wolfgang has authored and co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and presented his research at international venues. He has received national awards for his research work, was awarded a Top Cited Article 2005-2010 from Pergamon/Elsevier, and received a best paper honorable mention at IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST). He is also the founder and coordinator of a public Wiki to collect and share information on InfoVis (InfoVis:Wiki). His main research interests include visual analytics and information visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI), usability, and user-centered design.
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Silvia Miksch
has been head of the Information and Knowledge Engineering research group, Institute of Software Technology & Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology since 1998. From 2006 to 2010 she was professor and head of the Department of Information and Knowledge Engineering at Danube University Krems, Austria. In April 2010 she established the awarded Laura Bassi Centre of Expertise "CVAST -- Center for Visual Analytics Science and Technology (Design, Interact & Explore)" funded by the Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth of the Republic of Austria. Silvia has acquired, led, and has been involved in several national and international research projects. She has served on various program committees of international scientific conferences and was conference paper co-chair of the IEEE Conferences on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (IEEE VAST 2010, 2011) at VisWeek. She has more than 180 scientific publications and her main research interests are information visualization, visual analytics, plan management, and time.
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Heidrun Schumann
is a professor at the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Rostock, Germany, where she heads the Computer Graphics Research Group. Her research and teaching activities cover a number of topics related to computer graphics, particularly including information visualization, visual analytics, and rendering. More specifically, she is interested in the visualization of structures and multivariate data in space and time, in the design of scalable visual interfaces, and in terrain rendering techniques. Her current research projects are funded by public agencies and industry and span from fundamental research (e.g., scalable visualization methods and visual interfaces for smart environments) to applied research (e.g., computer graphics in the cockpit and visualization of bio-medical data). Heidrun is co-author of the first German textbook on visualization.
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Christian Tominski
is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Rostock, Germany. Together with his colleagues from the Computer Graphics Research Group, Christian has authored and co-authored several articles on new visualization and interaction concepts as well as on aspects related to the software engineering of information visualization techniques. His current research interests are the visualization of multivariate data in time and space, the visualization of graph structures, and the promising opportunities of utilizing novel display and interaction devices for visualization. He is particularly interested in the role of interaction for the visual exploration and analysis of data. Christian developed a number of visualization systems and tools, including the LandVis system for spatio-temporal data, the VisAxes tool for time-oriented data, and the graph visualization system CGV.
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