[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Todd R.Warfel]

There seems to be two key weaknesses in information visualization to 
date:
1) Tools
2) Effective display methods

James is correct that tools, research, and time are big items that need 
to be worked out. Yes, there are tools out there to do visualization. 
However, there's not a good tool set for making the visualization 
understandable to the masses, yet.

As an example, at Cornell, one of the Labs I've worked with tracks 
various types of species (e.g. birds, elephants, whales). They have 
massive amounts of data. I think one of their databases has over 15 
million records of bird observations and is growing rapidly on a daily 
basis. They use several methods to represent the data - information 
visualization. They have various charts and graphs, as well as 
visualization of the data on various maps (e.g. Street, Top, Aerial).

These types of visualizations "work" for some, but not most. They're 
just not simple and rich enough. You'd think that a line graph would be 
"simple enough," but you'd be surprised. And there are better methods 
(example below). Based on some testing we did, only an estimated 3% of 
those using these visualizations actually understand them. But these 
are the types of visualizations that the current tools allow.

Enter the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I'm not sure if 
any of you are familiar with their program or not, but they are doing 
some amazing stuff with visualization. They wrote a custom application 
to visualize and render the data using OpenGL running on UNIX, which 
they're porting over to OS X. Yes, it does the standard bars, charts, 
graphs, etc. But it also did some amazing stuff with solar systems, 
using plants that rotate around an ant hill to show traffic patterns at 
a conference and other things. It was so simple, yet allowed for a 
tremendous amount of data extraction.

On Nov 10, 2003, at 1:18 AM, James Spahr wrote:

> The stuff that needs to be worked out? Tools, research, and time to 
> make the mountain that needs constant climbing into a molehill.


Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel
User Experience Architect
MessageFirst | making products easier to use
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