Taxonomy

Since Information Visualization is a relatively infant research area, no single taxonomy dominates. We need to develop one for various reasons:

• Users can choose appropriate InfoVis technologies among the taxonomy
• Developers and designers can see possible design choices
• Researchers can draw clearer boundary of InfoVis and find the future research directions

Guzman and Verstappen (2003) listed the following characteristics of well established index terms, which can be applicable to establish a taxonomy:

• Exhaustivity: all the themes, objects and concepts dealt with by the document are to be found in the index.
• Selectivity: only information of interest to users has been selected.
• Specificity: the description represents the contents of the document as accurately as possible and avoids over-general or over-precise descriptors where specific or less precise terms would be more appropriate.
• Consistency: another indexer or a user would normally describe the same document, or documents on the same subject, in the same way.

The following list shows the currently available taxonomy: