Final Week

This week I have been working to polish up the interface. I have been experimenting with two features of the interface. Primarily I have focused on getting the two different distortions to work satisfactorily. The Fisheye distortion expands the area immediately around the cursor. The Bi Focal distortion expands the quadrants that correspond to the mouse's X and Y coordinates. Under most circumstances neither produces desirable results because of how it relates the distortion to the tree. The distortion assumes that the tree fills the entire screen, but because the tree only consists of a portion of the screen the distortions alters the tree in unpredictable and often undesirable ways. On the circle layout the effect are good, but otherwise it is only frustrating.


Example of the tree using the fisheye distortion

The draging function is working well and (believe) I also added another scaling function. I haven't been able to check to see if it works yet because I don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel. If it is working and the effect is what I hope it is I plan to try mapping this to the two finger scrolling on the trackpad.

The final thing I have been working on adding more visual cues to the tree this includes adding color coding the nodes to indicate which are active and adding text indicating ranking. The color coding is not working yet, I haven't been able to figure out how to discern which nodes have contents and which don't yet unfortunately .

Future work


Implementing the sizing function is going to be an important component for future work. After discussing design options with the biologist this design was found to be the most satisfactory option. This was because each ranking is necessarily smaller than the parent rank. preserving this relationship that displays the ranking data is more important than emphasizing the size differences between all the rankings.

Week 6

This week I focused on getting making the content of the tree easier to view. This is a real problem because the size of a given taxa can be have 100s of elements. I added "Fisheye" and "Bifocal" distortions to the tree to try and remedy this but neither provided a satisfactory result.



Instead, of focusing on this I added dragging functionality to the tree, so that the user can reorient the tree according to their needs. This is not an entierely satisfactory solution but for now it allows me to view all of the tree.



In addition to this I added the names of the species and made the nodes expandable and contractable. This also presented technical problems which I am working to resolve.

Week 5

The focus of this week has been on getting the visualization to display JSON queries. This has been made more difficult because of a dearth of online resources for working with JSON and actionscript in Flare. However I managed to make some progress. Currently all of the graph layouts seem to work. However, I have not yet been able connect the tree to the intro page I have been working on.

Taxonomic units

One important consideration in taxonomic information is that the model that most people learn about taxonomic groupings is inconsistent with the way that the species are currently classified. This creates a conflict between what taxonomic information users expect to see and how it should be classified by real distinctions between species. After the interviews that I conducted I determined that users tended to conceptualize information according to the Linnaean classification system. In particular users thought about the information in terms of the taxonomic units:

• Class
• Genus
• Species

For this reason I have decided to have the introduction to the information visualization system beginning with class data. The exact classes chosen should be based on classes. However there are far more classes than can be easily represented on a screen. I choose several based on the suggestions of the zoologists at the ADW. The hope is that these classes will help users orient themselves to the data by providing familiar groupings. The class should also be displayed in a way that presents the respective sizes of the classes. The visualization above is an attempt to visualize the selected classification data.

Visualizing Sizes of Taxonomic Units

The goal for this week was to display the size for each taxonomic unit. While displaying size is simplistic, representing size in a manner that allows the tree to remain continuously represented posed some challenges. After sketching I settled on this design for several reasons.

1. The representation allows the user to see the relation between the tree and the size simultaneously
2. Representing the size doesn't distort the taxonomy information
3. The linear representation of size allows for easy comparison between taxonomic units

The major detriment is that it takes up more horizontal screen real estate than would be ideal. This problem could be lessened by repositioning the text.

Visualizing Trees

These sketches demonstrate some of the trade-offs involved in visualizing taxonomic trees. In classic taxonomic trees the parent taxa intersects the branch in the center (illustration on the left) . While this system has the benefit of following a convention it resulted in trees that required much more horizontal screen real estate. To counter this I choose to use the indented tree lay out (illustration on the right)

This mock up demonstrates a more complete model of the visualization system's interface.

Overview

Animal Diversity Web (ADW) is an online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology at the University of Michigan. One goal of the ADW is to provide Tools for science learning. ADW facilitates inquiry-driven learning, that is, teaching about science by leading students to use the methods of science. Our large database is structured, providing consistent information for all species to foster comparisons. An advanced search tool allows a user to call up species accounts fitting any combination of descriptors. Students can explore for patterns and relationships, learn how to frame and answer scientific questions and, with the help of a good teacher, experience the excitement and satisfaction of doing science. Our long-term goal is to create a database rich enough that students can discover for themselves basic concepts in ecology and conservation biology.

To facilitate this goal I am developing a visualization tool that will help users locate species and make inferences about the relationships between items in the collection. This will done with a interactive treemap based on the Prefuse Flare visualization tool. Flare is a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations including basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the Adobe Flash Player. Flare applications can be built using the free Adobe Flex SDK or Adobe's Flex Builder IDE.