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Visualizing Uncertainty in Node-Link Diagrams - a User Study

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Advances in Usability and User Experience (AHFE 2017)

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Abstract

Uncertainty visualization is manifold and applied in many disciplines of visualization. In node-link diagrams, the edges can have uncertain attributes; these are to be presented directly in the graph. On the one hand, the uncertainty values are encoded with visual variable. On the other hand, the user has to decode the visualization to identify the original value. In this paper, we focus on four uncertainty visualization techniques and their suitability to enable the user to decode and identify the correct values. In our evaluation, we investigate the maximum number of different levels that can be used for each technique such that a user is able to reliably distinguish different values.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially funded by the German research foundation (DFG) within the IRTG 2057 “Physical Modeling for Virtual Manufacturing Systems and Processes” and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Technology in the context of “Smart Data - Innovations in Data”, grant no. 01MD15004E.

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Correspondence to Johannes Schwank .

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Schwank, J., Schöffel, S. (2018). Visualizing Uncertainty in Node-Link Diagrams - a User Study. In: Ahram, T., Falcão, C. (eds) Advances in Usability and User Experience. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 607. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60492-3_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60492-3_47

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