Natural Selection: Interactive Subset Creation

Abstract

Visualization is a critical technology for understanding complex, data-rich systems. Effective visualizations make important features of the data immediately recognizable and enable the user to discover interesting and useful results by highlighting patterns. A key element of such systems is the ability to interact with displays of data by selecting a subset for further investigation. This operation is needed for use in linked views systems and in drill-down analysis. It is a common manipulation in many other systems and is as ubiquitous as selecting icons in a desktop graphical user interface (GUI). It is therefore surprising to note that little research has been done on how selection can be implemented. This article addresses this omission, presenting a taxonomy for selection mechanisms and discussing the interactions between branches of the taxonomy.