Browsing Multidimensional Visual Entities

摘要

The field of Information Visualization seeks to identify the general principles of visualization, and makes use of these principles to propose new forms of visualization for specific types of data. Included in these different data types, it was identified a data type which was not thoroughly explored. The notion of entities where each entity is composed by different attributes, and one of these attributes is composed by one picture which invokes a strong feeling of familiarity to the user. The information that we are attempting to visualize is the most basic type of data structure, a table, where the number of entities to visualize should be higher than we can humanely count, yet smaller than a few thousands. In the field of visualization we identified a niche where the main focus is the image, and despite that it has a vast number of applicable scenarios, it hadn't been properly explored. One of the major attempts at doing so, was by Microsoft Live Labs and it demonstrated limitations that will be addressed by our approach. In order to evaluate the proposed forms of visualization they will be applied and evaluated with the Deloitte Portugal organizational case-study.