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An evolutional model for operation-driven visualization design

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Abstract

Although there are many visualization authoring tools, often the design process is confirmatory in that the user either selects and refines pre-built visualization templates or manually constructs the visualization following the standard visual mapping pipelines. During this process, an amount of time is spent on the interactive specification of visual forms or visual encoding configurations. In this paper, we present a novel visualization design scheme that provides operational guidance for progressive refinements when designing a visualization. The key idea is an evolutional operation model that models the design flowchart as a composition of a sequence of operations based on the current design and recommends available evolutions in the design space. One distinct advantage of our approach is that it facilitates discovering design subtasks relevant to the visualizations and enables the composition of a visualization based on the evolutional operations. As a demonstration of the concept, we implement a prototype and test its efficiency on a set of challenging design examples. Case studies verify that the proposed scheme effectively enhances the creativity of designs and releases the user from having to interpret their data and design intention with toolkit-specific abstractions.

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Notes

  1. https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Auto+MPG.

  2. http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Wine+Quality.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all the participants for their active participation. The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61772456, 61972122).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The State Key Lab of CAD& CG, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, Zhejiang, China

    Yating Wei & Wei Chen

  2. Zhejiang University - China Southern Power Grid Joint Research Centre on AI, Hangzhou, China

    Wei Chen

  3. Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, 311121, China

    Honghui Mei

  4. Digital Grid Research Institute, China Southern Power Grid, Guangzhou, 510670, China

    Wenqi Huang

  5. Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Xiangyang Wu

  6. Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou , 450001, China

    Mingliang Xu

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  1. Yating Wei
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  2. Honghui Mei
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  3. Wenqi Huang
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  4. Xiangyang Wu
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  5. Mingliang Xu
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  6. Wei Chen
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Correspondence to Wei Chen.

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Wei, Y., Mei, H., Huang, W. et al. An evolutional model for operation-driven visualization design. J Vis 25, 95–110 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-021-00784-w

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