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]

Table Lens Focus+Context Technique

Focus+Context techniques support visualizing an entire information structure at once as well as zooming in on specific items. [Rao and Card, 1994]

The predominant method in diplaying tabular data is using the structured view of a spreadsheet respectively a table. Spreadsheets focus on all datasets in an equal proportion. Table Lens focuses only on some datasets. When the data sets become too large to be displayed in a proper way some other visualisation technique must be found.

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 focal area on rows 4-6 by 2 cells (columns G and H) .

Example

Displaying an entire dataset in one screen and the use of tabular data.

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