Comparing Information Visualization Tools Focusing on the Temporal Dimensions

Empirical comparisons and categorizations of information visualization tools lack important considerations: the former undervalue the need for a theoretical background, and the latter tend to have too much distance from the user because they do not consider definite user tasks. Therefore, our work combines these approaches and presents the results of both a qualitative evaluation and a recently published categorization. We focus on the visualization of temporal data and reveal that current tools realize only a small part of the visualization possibilities in this field.