Situated Analytics

International audienceThis chapter introduces the concept of situated analytics that employs data representations organized in relation to germane objects, places, and persons for the purpose of understanding, sensemaking, and decision-making. The components of situated analytics are characterized in greater detail, including the users, tasks, data, representations, interactions, and analytical processes involved. Several case studies of projects and products are presented that exemplify situated analytics in action. Based on these case studies, a set of derived design considerations for building situated analytics applications are presented. Finally, there is a an outline of a research agenda of challenges and research questions to explore in the future

A taxonomy of visualization tasks for the analysis of biological pathway data

BACKGROUND: Understanding complicated networks of interactions and chemical components is essential to solving contemporary problems in modern biology, especially in domains such as cancer and systems research. In these domains, biological pathway data is used to represent chains of interactions that occur within a given biological process. Visual representations can help researchers understand, interact with, and reason about these complex pathways in a number of ways. At the same time, these datasets offer unique challenges for visualization, due to their complexity and heterogeneity. RESULTS: Here, we present taxonomy of tasks that are regularly performed by researchers who work with biological pathway data. The generation of these tasks was done in conjunction with interviews with several domain experts in biology. These tasks require further classification than is provided by existing taxonomies. We also examine existing visualization techniques that support each task, and we discuss gaps in the existing visualization space revealed by our taxonomy. CONCLUSIONS: Our taxonomy is designed to support the development and design of future biological pathway visualization applications. We conclude by suggesting future research directions based on our taxonomy and motivated by the comments received by our domain experts