A Framework to Analyze Information Visualization Based on the Functional Data Model

We propose a framework for analyzing information visualization (infovis) based on the concept of functional dependency (FD). Although functional dependencies express important semantic information of data, they are rarely taken into account by general purpose infovis tools-- a fact that may cause problems in the visualization process. The main idea of our approach is to use the concept of FD for modeling the invariant structures of all three components of information visualization that is data, visual representations, and visual mappings.