Most of us know what the Periodic Table of the chemical elements is, but there is more application to that paradigm other than just chemistry.
This is a very interesting and complete table showing Visualization Methods…
The original interactive version is here (put the mouse pointer over each symbol and see).
Visual languages are based on certain common primitive elements for express the intended message, situtation or subject.
As far as I can see, the most used are…
Next, an overview of some common practices and techniques for knowledge transfer: Visual Languages.
Concept Maps: Based on a question (e.g.: “what caused the 2008 financial crisis?”), depicts general knowledge about that topic using concepts and their relationships on a free graph layout.
Mind Maps: Organizes ideas and knowledge around a central topic on a radial (centered hierarchy) graph layout. They commonly uses various colors, images and curved lines for easy memorization.
Entity-Relationship diagrams: On a business domain, depicts entities and thir relationship from a data modeling perspective.
Flowcharts: Depicts the logical steps for performing a task, considering processes, decisions, inputs, outputs, storing and their flow.
Unified Modeling Language: A complex language for general modeling, mostly used on computer science related projects. It has various types of diagrams. The most popular are:
Electronic Diagrams: Shows electronic components and their arrange on a circuit or board.
Chemical Diagrams: Shows the structural formula of chemical compounds at molecular level.
Military Plan: Shows the planification for war movements. It considers direction, timing, type and strength of forces in the theater of operations.
Maybe, for any human knowledge area, there are a visual language developed. Plus consider that many organizations have developed their own visual languages, and they are changing over time and evolve following the development on their industries or even creating new ones (e.g.: nanotech, genetic engineering). Such particular well focused dialects are called Domain Specific Languages.
Infographics is a style of showing information in a simple graphical way, either static (images) or dynamic (animations) with the minimum necessary detail over a particular topic. The most common examples are traffic signals and subway maps. Main concepts are replaced by basic and well known shapes such as people, vehicles, bridges, houses and so on.
Signs of an austrian highway
To achieve a fast and clear perception from viewers, images and information are reduced and combined and differentiated using areas, layers, colors and other visual cues such as legends.
Simplified map of a subway system
The effectiveness of Infographics is being used also in a variety of media types like: video clips (music, fairy tales, etc.), newspapers, products manuals, posters and software.
Representative chart
In the past, most user interfaces used graphical styles with prevalence of cartoonish images (icons) and 3D and polylined controls. This is changing to more simple and less bloated environments.
Typical 1990s GUI
Simplified GUI (oct. 2008)
Maybe Star Trek designer Mike Okuda, with his LCARS interface, was a visionary ahead of his time. The simplified interface can be seen in some of today’s applications.
Star Trek (TNG) LCARS GUI.
And don’t forget Einstein’s phrase: “make things as simple as possible, but no simpler“. There must exists equilibrium between simplicity and usability.
In our thinking we reference things (objects or people) in abstract or symbolic ways, using images (shapes or faces), concepts (like “car”, “the big green thing behind me”, “mom”, etc.) or a mental pseudo-conversation with ourselves (this time using language). While less abstract and more language related are the thoughts, more is the need to reference things with an artificial and language-transmittable label: the Name.
Names came as the immediate and main attribute about new things that we create or are presented to us. Then culture, practical convenience and personal creativity guide the act of naming:
Maybe the biggest problem when naming is to find or create the most original name to avoid repetition over certain scope. Commonly a person name can have many people assigned (e.g.: “Sarah Connor”), therefore a most universal and error-safe main attribute had to be created (e.g.: a national id. number like the SSN). Then the identifier (or “Id”) become a solution for feasibility, precision and unambiguity for massive and systematic naming.
I can think a couple of ways for creating identifiers…
By using complicated names for universal reach, there appears the need to simplify them within the local context for practical (fast) use, or to make them special or relevant. Then we have aliases, which can serve to various purposes such as: local fast referencing, real identity hiding (e.g.: ”callsign” of a combat pilot) or creation of multiple identities (e.g.: for commercial, personal or “alternative” activities).
In structuring name conformation there can appear conventions according to the domain being represented. Some conventions can be:
About the problems of naming things, I can think of…
Lets think twice when naming. A good name helps to make more or less recognizable, findable or unique that named thing or person.
A whole subject apart is the naming of a commercial product. You can find books, websites and companies entirely dedicated just to create good names for products. I hope to write about that interesting topic in the future.
Dipity timeline viewer
Sometimes we need to show multiple aspects or visions of a topic on various tracks of that Time road. Then a simple line is not enough and a parallel set of lines is required.
Schofields & Sims world history timeline
Plus, consider to show the timeline on the vertical axis.
Mozilla web browser timeline
Also, the amount of events to be displayed may be not dispersed on a regular basis, more when contrasting areas of time with almost no info against other plentiful of it. A way to overcome these inequalities is make timelines with non-linear shapes, for example using spirals, triangles or arcs.
Agard's biblical timeline
Finally, you can see an interesting site about history of Timelines here.
A common need is the graphical showing of hierarchies, containment, origination or classification, which can be represented as one-to-many relationships in a Tree structure. Tree in the sense of a root with many branches, usually shown downward for reading purposes. Examples of these are organizational charts, containment diagrams or navigational controls in software applications. A special application of trees is the representation of space or usage as areas such these shown in Treemaps. A very good explanation of trees and treemaps can be found here.
Tree samples
Also there is the radial representation and navigation in the so called Hyperbolic Trees, either in 2D or 3D views.
Hyperbolic tree samples
The problem with this structure is that each node can have just one parent or dominant, making it not always suitable for reflecting reality albeit simple to understand and affordable for implementation.
In the beginning there was the unsorted set, then the List and, when many lists become unmanegeable, the Table appeared. Made of intersecting lists conforming either rows or columns, they are used as boards, guides, matrixes and files. Let see an example:
Calendar Rune
Making a big jump in time, we can find one of the first electronic versions of tables: the spreadsheet application:
Multiplan for DOS
Notice that numbered column titles instead of the now common letter based style.
As data and information management growth and as computers provided more powerful and flexible tools, there was a new paradigm: The Cube (AKA: Hyper-Cube or OLAP Cube). Although still represented on a two-dimensional surface, the general idea is to represent a third dimension, time, and also show the information in a more efficient an useful way by grouping/nesting, sorting, filtering and “drilling” up/down on the same visual interface.
OLAP Cube from ContourComponents
Today, these tables/spreadsheets/cubes are not just presenting data, but also providing navigation, formatting, validation and simulation capabilities, all in integration with other visual and processing paradigms. Nice evolution.
Communication is a basic need for almost any being. Either for amazon’s ants transmitting chemical messages to announce presence of food, or for primitive humans painting caves to tell stories about hunting or register their cattle property.
Cave painting
Then, as society growth and evolved into more complex relationships (tribes to nations), settlements (villages to cities), housing (hut to houses, buildings or palaces), and so on, the need to register and share also increased. In the visual aspect, the using of paper (or its ancestors: leather and papyrus) gives the painting or writing the ability to be mobile and replicable.
Egyptian papyrus
Of course the more obvious use of drawings are the representation of things, such as animals, people, machines or buildings, inherently linked to art, literacy, engineering, sciences, architecture, religious depictions and historic or politic topics. Appart from these, there started the need to associate information and drawing for use in such documents like genealogy trees, maybe the first kind of diagrams.
Medieval genealogy diagram
Again, centuries passed until the first formal diagrams were conceived. In turn, these more elaborated diagrams, were result of more sophisticated management techniques and science advances, mainly in the Scientific and the Industrial revolutions.
