Seminar report on "Information or Data Visualizing Techniques"

Visualization is the graphical presentation of information, with the goal of providing the viewer with a qualitative understanding of the information contents. Information can be in any form, like data, processes, relations, or concepts. Graphical presentation may entail manipulation of graphical entities (points, lines, shapes, images, text) and attributes (color, size, position, shape). Understanding of information involves detection, measurement, and comparison. It can be further enhanced via interactive techniques and providing the information from multiple views and with multiple techniques.

One of the active research and challenging task is representing and making sense of multidimensional data, partially due to the three- dimensional space we live in. Visualization techniques are powerful sense-making tools that support knowledge workers in their decision-making activities by stimulating visual thinking. While most of the scientific, engineering, and business data is multi-dimensional; i.e. datasets contain typically more than three attributes of data.

Characteristics of Data:

• Numeric, symbolic (or mix)
• Scalar, vector, or complex structure
• Various units
• Discrete or continuous
• Spatial, quantity, category, temporal, relational, structural
• Accurate or approximate
• Dense or sparse
• Ordered or non-ordered
• Disjoint or overlapping
• Binary, enumerated, multilevel
• Independent or dependent
• Multidimensional
• Single or multiple sets
• May have similarity or distance metric
• May have intuitive graphical representation (e.g. temperature with color)
• Has semantics which may be crucial in graphical consideration

The purpose of information visualization is the insights into data that it provides. Diversity analysis has got a great significance in economic and other branches of social science. Visualizing the Diversity Analysis gives significant importance in identifying the profitability of the commodities as well as the countries. The concentration measures such as entropyand Herfinahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) gives the significant results in identifying the Diversity nature of the countries as well as the commodities. We visualized the commodity exportdata along with the Concentration Measures using star coordinates.

Books: The craft of information visualization: readings and reflections By Benjamin B. Bederson, Ben Shneiderman
Web resources: Graphics & Visualization
Visualization and Graphics at UC Davis
Download Power Point Presentation (PPT): Scientific Data Visualization