Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2006/07 - Gruppe 02 - Aufgabe 1 - Table Lens

Definition

The Table Lens is a new technique for visualizing and making sense of large tables. By fusing symbolic and graphical representations into a single manipulable focus+context display and providing a small set of interactive operations (e.g. sorting), the Table Lens supports navigating around a large data space easily isolating and investigating interesting features and patterns.

[Rao and Card, 1994]

The Table Lens supports effective interaction with much larger tables than conventional spreadsheets do. It uses a focus+context (fisheye) technique that works effectively on tabular information because it allows display of crucial label information and multiple distal focal areas.

[Rao and Card, 1994]

The Table Lens, focus+context visualization for large data tables, allows users to see 100 times as many data values as a spreadsheet in the same screen space in a manner that enables an extremely immediate form of exploratory data analysis.

[Tenev and Rao, 1997]

Description | Background | Technique

Displaying certain amounts of tabular data on the display of a computer screen in a lucid way can be seen as one of the motivations for developing this visualization. A spreadsheet can display a maximum of 660 cells at once on a 19 inch display (at cell size of 100 by 15 pixels, 82dpi). [Rao and Card, 1994] The Table Lens can comfortably manage about 30 times as many cells and can display up to 100 times as many cells in support of many tasks. The scale advantage is obtained by using a so-called focus+context or fisheye technique. [Rao and Card, 1994]

Table Lens Focus+Context Technique

Focus+Context techniques support visualizing an entire information structure at once as well as zooming in on specific items. This interplay between focus and context supports searching for patterns in the big picture and fluidly investigating interesting details without losing framing context.

The Table Lens technique has been motivated by the particular nature of tables. The most salient feature of a table is the regularity of its content: information along rows or columns is interrelated, and can be interpreted on some reading as a coherent set, e.g. members of a group or attributes of an object. This is reflected in the fact that tables usually have labels at row and column edges that identify some portion of the meaning of the items in the row or column. These observations indicated a need to preserve the coherence of rows and columns and their labels despite distortions to

The Table Lens mutates the layout of a table without bending any rows or columns. Cells in the focal area and the table row and column divide the total focus space of each dimension appropriately. [Rao and Card, 1994]

The graph shows a 10 by 14 table with the focus area on rows 4-6 by 2 cells.

Examples

InfoVis–Wiki InfoVis–Wiki

References

[Tenev and Rao, 1997] T. Tenev, R. Rao, "Managing multiple focal levels in Table Lens," infovis, p. 59, 1997 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis '97), 1997

[Rao and Card, 1994] R. Rao, S.K. Card. The Table Lens: Merging Graphical and Symbolic Representations in an Interactive Focus+Context Visualization for Tabular Information. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, April 1994. Retrieved at: October 29, 2006. http://www.ramanarao.com/papers/tablelens-chi94.pdf