Transcript APT(Presentation)

Automating the Design of
Graphical Presentations of
Relational Information
Jock MacKinlay
Beth Weinstein
March 14, 2001
Paper Outline
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Introduction
Expressiveness
Effectiveness
Composition
Implementation
Introduction
• Previously application designers had to anticipate
every situation and “predesign” graphic designs
• In related work, the BHARAT system,
automatically creates 2D graphical designs based
on the data type. For example, the system
automatically chose to show the data as a line chart
if the data was continuous.
Introduction
• MacKinlay’s goal was to build a
presentation tool (APT) that would create a
graphic design that would express relations
and their basic properties effectively
• APT would have the best way to view 2-D
data using expressiveness and effectiveness
criteria. The paper focuses on 2-D static
presentations of relational data (scatter
plots, bar charts, etc.)
Introduction
• Three types of data
• ordinal (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)
• nominal (United States, Mexico, Canada)
• quantitative (1, 2, 3)
• Problems could arise when there are
multiple and conflicting criteria for a data
set
Expressiveness Criteria
identify graphical languages that express the desired information
• Expressive if
• include all data in the set
• include only data from the set
Expressiveness Criteria
Effectiveness Criteria
identify which graphical languages is most effective at using the
output and human capabilities
• Based on human perceptual capabilities
• Graphical design interpreted quickly and
accurately
• Cleveland and McGill’s conjectural theory different graphical designs are interpreted
by people with varying accuracy
Expressiveness Criteria
Effectiveness Criteria
Composition
• Merge different encoding techniques not
usually combined
Implementation
• Partitioning
• A divide and conquer algorithm
• Partition on most important element
• Selection
• For each partition, a list of graphic design is
generated based on expressiveness criteria
• Then, the list is ordered by the effectiveness criteria
• Composition
• Each partition’s graphic design is tested to see if they
both can be applied, if not the next most effective
graphic design is used
Favorite Sentence
“…an important responsibility of a user
interface is to make intelligent use of
human visual abilities and output media
whenever it presents information to the
user.”
Reference Notes
• MacKinlay - Ph.D. dissertation
• Cleveland and McGill
• General, well-cited references
• Tufte
• Knuth
Critique
• Strengths
• Proves that a graphical design may not be
appropriate for all types of data
• Gives a criteria for perceptual tasks
• Weaknesses
• Vague on how extended Cleveland and
McGill’s criteria
• Composition algebra unnecessary
Contributions
• Provides a ranking of perceptual tasks for
nominal, ordinal, and quantitative data
• Contributes a new graphical designs by
combining perceptual tasks
• Creates a tool that will create expressive
and effective graphical designs based on the
data