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]

Table Lens Focal Technique

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

The graph shows a 10 by 14 table with a focal area of 3 by 2 cells. 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 Distortion

Cells are allocated spaces along each dimension independently, there is an interaction in cell geometry. Four types of cell regions are created by the disortion on the two axis: focal, row focal, column focal and nonfocal.

Focal cells are in the focus area along both axes, row focal and column focal are both half focal in that they are in the focal area of only one of the two axes, and nonfocal are in the context area along both axes.

The distortions produced by many focus+context techniques can be described

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