Task taxonomy for graph visualization

Abstract

Our goal is to define a list of tasks for graph visualization that has enough detail and specificity to be useful to: 1) designers who want to improve their system and 2) to evaluators who want to compare graph visualization systems. In this paper, we suggest a list of tasks we believe are commonly encountered while analyzing graph data. We define graph specific objects and demonstrate how all complex tasks could be seen as a series of low-level tasks performed on those objects. We believe that our taxonomy, associated with benchmark datasets and specific tasks, would help evaluators generalize results collected through a series of controlled experiments.

Crowdsourcing for Information Visualization: Promises and Pitfalls

“…Many taxonomies have been suggested to organize tasks performed by participants, working with visualizations (e.g., [93,8,61,96,21]). The purpose of these taxonomies is to support visualization experts in creating the visualization design and to support the evaluation of visualizations.…”

“…The authors performed ten different experiments each with a different task. Their tasks are inspired by the graph task taxonomy of Lee et al [61] which is in turn inspired by the information visualization task taxonomy of Amar et al [8]. Neither of these taxonomies has any consideration about the impact of using crowdsourcing for an evaluation.…”

“…Path tracing is a frequently used task for graph evaluation [83,102,73,55], and would be considered a connectivity task in the graph task taxonomy of Lee at al. [61]. If the task is to determine if the shortest path between two nodes is 1,2, or 3 hops between a pair of nodes, as done in [73], the participant may find the shortest path, but have to continue searching to verify that it is indeed the shortest.…”

Scalable graph exploration and visualization: Sensemaking challenges and opportunities

“…Lee et al taxonomized common graph visualization interactions in [77]. They separate low level tasks into topological, attribute, and browsing based groups.…”

Graph Drawing through the Lens of a Framework for Analyzing Visualization Methods

“…As the name suggests, all node-link diagrams are an instance of using link connection marks. These diagrams best support tasks that pertain to the topological structure of networks [7], for example path tracing. In tree drawing, containment is also used; for example, all treemap variants are an instance of using link containment marks.…”