Overview

Overview provides a general context for understanding the data set; it paints a "picture" of the whole data entity that the information visualization represents. Patterns and themes in the data that may be helpful can often be seen only from a vantage point that comprises the whole view. From this perspective, major components and their relationships to one another are made evident. Simply the overall shape of the data itself can provide assistance in understanding the information that is encoded. Significant features can be discerned and selected for further examination. Such features might not be readily viewable from another part of the data representation or might be obscured from certain vantage points. Revealing these features at the outset can aid the user in filtering the extraneous information so that they can complete their task more efficiently by excluding unimportant aspects of the representation.

[Craft and Cairns, 2005]

References

• [Craft and Cairns, 2005] B. Craft and P. Cairns, Beond Guidelines: What Can We Learn from the Visual Information Seeking Mantra? Proceedings of the Nineth International Conference on Information Visualization 2005 (IV05), p. 110-118, 2005.