Modeling Incremental Visualizations

An increasing number of applications call for the incremental/iterative drawing of a visualization. That is an obvious requirement when dealing with continuously changing data, like the emerging field of data streams or scientific visualizations that have the burden of rendering complex and evolving physical phenomena. This paper postulates that the same need is rising in the field of Visual Analytics and cloud based applications and, in order to provide a support for such processes, it presents a formal model for characterizing the iterative drawing of a visualization, describing the practical issues and outlining the main parameters that can be used to drive and evaluate the whole process. The proposed model is general enough to capture all of the above presented scenarios. Two examples are presented, showing the role that such a model can play in designing iterative visualizations.