Enhancing Visual Exploration by Appropriate Color Coding

Abstract

Visualization is an effective means for exploring and analyzing complex data. Color coding is a fundamental technique for mapping data to visual representations. Although color coding is widely used in a large variety of visualizations, it is often provided in a limited way only or it is not used effectively. Therefore, we describe in this paper how appropriate (automatic) color coding can enhance the visual exploration of spatial-temporal data. We demonstrate our techniques with a system for visualizing human health data by means of choropleth maps. Furthermore, we focus on how to use color coding for facilitating comparison tasks in visualization.