Visualization Patterns: A Context-Sensitive Tool to Evaluate Visualization Techniques

In the myriad of visualization tools/techniques available to the users, it is hard to fathom the applicability of a given tool/technique to the visualization problem in hand. The tool users/evaluators have no guidance mechanism that could describe the suitability of visualization tools/techniques to fulfill their objectives. A tool may be good in one context and bad in another. This 'context of use' has become a pandemic in almost all measures of evaluations. To deal with this complex factor of tool selection/evaluation, we propose to describe a visualization tool/technique by encapsulating a technique in a pattern format describing the applicable context of use for it. We highlight the usefulness of such visualization patterns for evaluation by describing an exemplar visualization pattern solving a problem of displaying dependencies among software objects in the context of static software structure representation.