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Visualization-Based Taxonomy

Our work in taxonomy- and classification-based information visualization provides a central foundation for all of our research and development work. VT-CAD was the first long-term research focus in this field.

An early research project at PIIM involved the wholesale analysis of informative imagery. This proceeded from many former years of similar analysis and experience by the author. Thousands of images were reviewed with an aim at finding core, underlying principles relative to different kinds of principally objective (informative) representations.

The goal was to find underlying similarities between source information, communicative intent, communicative approach, and communicative outcomes; and then, to see if an exploitable language could be derived from such similarities. Dr. Arno Klein, now of Columbia University, contributed to this endeavor.

This paper is partially derived from that research and presents a high level view of the entire taxonomic concept – additional papers will provide specific detail, from the utility of the taxonomy to the innovative coding method used to identify and classify any image for its inclusion into the taxonomy. The shorthand name for this taxonomy is: VT-CAD ("Vee-Tee Cad"). It comes from an abbreviation of the full title as presented at a Washington DC academic symposium several years ago: A Visualization-Based Objective Taxonomy for Informative Representation for the Classification, Analysis, and the Design of Visualizations.