The Stardinates - visualizing highly structured data

Abstract

The Stardinates are a novel interactive information visualization (InfoVis) technique, which aims at visualizing highly structured data. They represent some Gestalt principles very well, especially the principles of Closure and 'Pragnanz'. As a consequence, Stardinates form very distinct and memorable patterns, which make abstraction and aggregation much easier. We give a formal description of the Stardinates as a basis for implementation. Furthermore, we show an application by visualizing psychotherapeutic data derived from a clinical study on anorectic girls.