Information Display

Abstract

Recent increases in the size of available datasets have created a strong demand for new ways of displaying information. This chapter describes some recent research into information display.Visualization is the process of generating a picture of a dataset. The data, which may be numerical, ordinal or nominal, is mapped onto visual variables so that they can be visually inspected. The visual variables determine the shapes and appearances of pictorial icons representing the data. These pictures are then placed on a display screen. The main challenge is to convey as much information as possible when these icons are displayed.In many cases, the data are modeled as a graph, and the visualization process is called Graph Drawing. Section 1 of this chapter describes new methods for drawing graphs, aimed at coping with very large data sets.The underlying display technology for visualization is undergoing rapid changes. In Section 2 we describe some of these new display technologies. These changes take information display beyond the visual; new methods for showing information using the nonvisual senses are described in Section 3. NEW METHODS FOR DRAWING VERY LARGE GRAPHSMuch of the information and data in real-world applications consists of entities and the relationships between the entities, and thus can be modeled mathematically as graphs. For example, traditional entity-relationship diagrams and UML diagrams in software engineering can be modeled as graphs. Biological data such as phylogenies can be modeled as trees, PPI (Protein-Protein Interaction)