Promoting Insight-Based Evaluation of Visualizations: From Contest to Benchmark Repository

Catherine Plaisant (1) , Jean-Daniel Fekete (2) , Georges Grinstein (3)

1 HCIL - Human-Computer Interaction Lab [College Park]
2 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization
3 IVPR - Institute for Vis and Perception Research

Information Visualization (InfoVis) is now an accepted and growing field but questions remain about the best uses for and the maturity of novel visualizations. Usability studies and controlled experiments are helpful but generalization is difficult. We believe that the systematic development of benchmarks will facilitate the comparison of techniques and help identify their strengths under different conditions. We were involved in the organization and management of three information visualization contests for the 2003, 2004 and 2005 IEEE Information Visualization Symposia, which requested teams to report on insights gained while exploring data. We give a summary of the state of the art of evaluation in information visualization, describe the three contests, summarize their results, discuss outcomes and lessons learned, and conjecture the future of visualization contests. All materials produced by the contests are archived in the Information Visualization Benchmark Repository.

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Catherine Plaisant, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Georges Grinstein. Promoting Insight-Based Evaluation of Visualizations: From Contest to Benchmark Repository. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2008, 14 (1), pp.120-134. ⟨10.1109/TVCG.2007.70412⟩. ⟨hal-00701742⟩