Tasks Taxonomy for Graphs

Low-Level Tasks

From [Amar et al. 2005] and [Lee et al 2006].

• General Tasks

Task	Description
Retrieve Value	Given a set of cases, find attributes of those cases.
Filter	Given some conditions on attributes values, find data cases satisfying those conditions.
Compute Derived Value	Given a set of data cases, compute an aggregate numeric representation of those data cases.(e.g. average, median, and count)
Find Extremum	Find data cases possessing an extreme value of an attribute over its range within the data set.
Sort	Given a set of data cases, rank them according to some ordinal metric. Determine Range Given a set of data cases and an attribute of interest, find the span of values within the set.
Characterize Distribution	Given a set of data cases and a quantitative attribute of interest, characterize the distribution of that attribute’s values over the set.
Find Anomalies	Identify any anomalies within a given set of data cases with respect to a given relationship or expectation, e.g. statistical outliers.
Cluster	Given a set of data cases, find clusters of similar attribute values.
Correlate	Given a set of data cases and two attributes, determine useful relationships between the values of those attributes.
Scan	Quickly review a set of items.
Set Operation	Given multiple sets of items, perform set operations on them. For example, find the intersection of the set of nodes.

• Graph Specific Tasks

Task	Description
Find Adjacent Nodes	Given a node, find its adjacent nodes.

References

• [Amar et al. 2005] Amar, R., Eagan, J., and Stasko, J. Low-Level Components of Analytic Activity in Information Visualization, Proceedings of the Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis ’05), pp. 111-117, 2005.

• [Lee et al. 2006] Lee, B., Plaisant, C., Parr, CS., Fekete, JD. and Henry, N. Task Taxonomy for Graph Visualization, In BEyond time and errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization (BELIV'06), Venice, Italy, May 2006, to be published.