Towards a Foundation for Information Visualization Engineering

Despite much progress, it remains challenging to develop new visualization systems, predict their qualities, and understand design trade-offs. We propose an empirical framework for Information Visualization (InfoVis) theories consisting of a context space, a visualization space, visualization metrics, and visualization principles. Using this framework, we identify 5 possible steps to advance InfoVis theory. While the underlying ideas we discuss will be familiar to readers, we hope that expressing them in a systematic framework will contribute to the discussion of InfoVis theory, identify challenges that still need to be addressed, and shed light on how to integrate different theories in InfoVis.