Information Visualization and Policy Modeling

Abstract

Policy design requires the investigation of various data in several design steps for making the right decisions, validating, or monitoring the political environment. The increasing amount of data is challenging for the stakeholders in this domain. One promising way to access the “big data” is by abstracted visual patterns and pictures, as proposed by information visualization. This chapter introduces the main idea of information visualization in policy modeling. First abstracted steps of policy design are introduced that enable the identification of information visualization in the entire policy life-cycle. Thereafter, the foundations of information visualization are introduced based on an established reference model. The authors aim to amplify the incorporation of information visualization in the entire policy design process. Therefore, the aspects of data and human interaction are introduced, too. The foundation leads to description of a conceptual design for social data visualization, and the aspect of semantics plays an important role.

Adaptive Semantics Visualization

“…The visualization techniques and methods will be introduced exemplary and do not claim to cover the state of the art. The main goal of this chapter that was partially published in [NSBK14,NK13] is to have a common understanding about the terms, methods, and techniques of information visualization. Therefore we chose the view from human side, the tasks, and the data to describe information visualization.…”

“…This section aims not at giving an insight of how the data are processes or topics are generated, it focuses more on the part of visual adaptation based on user and data as a distributed system. This section was partially published in [NSBK14,NBRK14].…”

“…The work on this application scenario is ongoing. It is intended to enhance this view on categorical and geographical overviews [NSBK14]. With these enhancements the application of our adaptive model would make sense.…”