Taxonomy

This taxonomy is to aid retrieval of works either within or about the field of information of Information Visualization (InfoVis) by providing controlled vocabulary of terms for the description of works.

It is a response to the lack of support for the field from existing instruments (CCS and LCSH) for retrieval.

Purposes of InfoVis taxonomy

Since InfoVis is a relatively new research area, taxonomies have been developed for aspects of the field including visualizations and software design patterns, no taxonomy for the field itself has been developed. We need to develop one for various reasons:

• Users can find appropriate InfoVis technologies among the taxonomy
• Developers and designers can find possible design choices
• Researchers can have an overview of the field to identify boundaries, gaps, hotspots, and future research directions

Preferred characteristics of a taxonomy

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.

Taxonomy

The following list shows the currently available taxonomy:

1. Draft taxonomy

Frameworks

Often, some literature about taxonomy simply suggests framework (e.g., Data State Model). These frameworks cannot meet the whole purpose of the taxonomy. Thus, these framework should be distinguished and listed separately as follows: