Building Information Visualizations: A Commonality Analysis

Recently, we applied the software engineering technique of commonality analysis to the domain of interactive information visualization. This produced an analysis of graphical data displays in terms of commonalities (features shared by all such displays) and variabilities (the ways in which displays differ). This analysis has applications in the areas of taxonomy, design and development, and visualization theory. We have used this analysis to develop a Java visualization framework, mmvz, which can be used for rapidly and flexibly building a large range of information visualizations. In this paper, we describe the commonality analysis process and its results. We also outline the mmvz architecture and present examples of using mmvz to create visualizations.