Task

There are a number of different task taxonomies in InfoVis at different levels of granularity.

Task Taxonomy of Relational Information Displays

by: [Zhang, 1996] based on [Carswell and Wickens, 1988]

There are three major types of display tasks:

• information retrieval
• comparison
• information integration

High-level tasks / purposes / goals of Visualization

Sources: [Schumann and Müller, 2000], [Keim et al., 2006]

• Visual Presentation
• Visual Exploration
• Visual Analysis

On the interplay between task and representation

Thus, although there are no best displays that are efficient for all types of tasks, there is a correct or incorrect mapping between the representation of a display and the structure of a task.

[Zhang, 1996]

References

• [Carswell and Wickens, 1988] Carswell, C. M. & Wickens, C. D. (1988). Comparative graphics: History and applications of perceptual integrality theory and the proximity compatibility hypothesis (TR ARL-88-2/AHEL-88-1). Aviation Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• [Keim et al., 2006] Keim, D.A.; Mansmann, F. and Schneidewind, J. and Ziegler, H., Challenges in Visual Data Analysis, Proceedings of Information Visualization (IV 2006), IEEE, p. 9-16, 2006.
• [Schumann and Müller, 2000] Heidrun Schumann and Wolfgang Müller, Visualisierung - Grundlagen und allgemeine Methoden. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
• [Zhang, 1996] Zhang, J. 1996. A representational analysis of relational information displays. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 45, 1 (Jul. 1996), 59-74. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1996.0042