Visualization Analysis and Design

Chapter 14

Embed: Focus+Context

14.1 The Big Picture

The family of idioms known as focus+context are based on the design choice to embed detailed information about a selected set—the focus—within a single view that also contains overview information about more of the data—the context. These idioms reduce the amount of data to show in the view through sophisticated combinations of filtering and aggregation. The design considerations are sufficiently complex that embedding is addressed separately in the analysis framework as a special case. A very large family of specific idioms that use some form of focus+context embedding has been proposed.*

* Many names are essentially synonyms for or special cases of focus+context: bifocal displays, degree-of-interest ...