| Radial user interfaces are an increasingly popular design metaphor in the information visualization community. Nevertheless, surprisingly little effort has been made to study these techniques as a methodology in their own right. Moreover, their application has been typically limited to the simple displaying and browsing of information, rather than for specifying precise queries. Furthermore, the space constraints inherent to their elliptical shape have limited their adoption for large real-world data sets.;This dissertation extends the current body of knowledge regarding radial visualization in three ways. First, we develop an extensive taxonomy for radial visualization, presenting a framework that will serve as a common vocabulary for future research in this area. Second, we show how radial visualization can be used not only for the passive display of information, but as an integrated system both for formulating and refining queries, and for visualizing their results. Third, we also show how our technique allows radial user interfaces to scale to arbitrarily large data sets.;We demonstrate our method's utility and ease of use through two quantitative user studies. Moreover, our interface has been applied to several data sets, suggesting its generality across a variety of application domains. |
