Review of Systems


In this page we provide additional information and details about our review of existing systems implementing Bertin's method:

Overview of all Systems

Click to view the full-res image. You can download the vector graphics file here.

For a description of this table, see our paper. For details on how the scores are computed, see below.

Software Presentation and Screenshots

1977 - CHART - W.H. Benson, B. Kitous

We did not manage to find and test this software.

1984 - TMC - J. Le Fourn, A. Mailles

We did not manage to find and test this software.

1984 - MATRIX - J.M. Fras, R. Gimeno, P.Y. Vicens

MATRIX ran on Thomson TO7.

1987 - CARTAX - R. Gimeno, M-F. Durand

MATRIX ran on Thomson TO7/MO5 using the Nanoreseau architecture.

1989 - VisuLab - H. Hinterberger

Available for download here (Windows only).

1994 - AMADO - J. Bertin, J. Risson, J.H. Chauchat, CISIA, France

1996 - Voyager - G. Sawitzki

Implementation of Bertin's matrices in the Voyager system.
More information about this project is available on the author's webpage. We are grateful to the authors, who created a new page and created several videos very quickly after we asked them information about their implementation.

A video is also available on the American Statistical Association media archive of historical recordings website.

2003 - TGINF - P. Orùs, G. Villarroya

2005 - The Reorderable Matrix - H. Siirtola

Java applet available here.

2005 - PermutMatrix - G. Caraux, S. Pinloche

Available for download here (Windows only).

2006 - MatrixExplorer - N. Henry-Riche, J-D. Fekete

Java web start available here.

2008 - T_ALK - R. Gosselin

Available for download here (Mac, Windows, Linux).

2008 - GAP - H-M. Wu, Y-J. Tien, C-H. Chen

Available for download here (Windows only).

2012 - R for Bertin - G. Sawitzki

Available for download here (R plugin).

2013 - D3 implementation - S. Rubin

Web app available here

2013 - Cartes et Données - ARTICQUE

Commercial product, available here (Free version for students).

Details of the scoring schemes

CRITERIA COMPUTATION
SOFTWARE

YEAR

Year of the latest software release.

DEVELOPED AT BERTIN'S LAB

  • 1 if the software was developped at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), bertin's lab
  • 0 otherwise

SOFTWARE TESTED

  • 1 if we were able to test the software
  • 0 otherwise

AVAILABILITY

A score reflecting how easy the software is to retrieve and get running. It is the product of an accessiblity score and a runnability score:

accessibility

  • 0: not available online, authors not reachable
  • 1: not available online, but can be obtained from authors
  • 2: can be found online, but hard
  • 3: online, commercial
  • 4: online and free

runnability

  • 0: did not manage to get running
  • 1: takes one or more days to get running (deprecated system)
  • 2: easy to run but single-platform
  • 3: multi-platform with required third-party software
  • 4: multi-platform stand-alone, or web app with required plugin
  • 5: Web app stand-alone
USER INTERFACE

Following the instrumental interaction model, we first score different interaction styles according to their spatial directness, temporal directness and degree of compatibility:

Interaction StyleSpatial DirectnessTemporal DirectnessDegree of Compatibility
Programming or scripting language000
Command line interface010
Menu sequences, assistants or dialog boxes without preview (text only)010
Menu sequences, assistants or dialog boxes without preview (with icons or widgets)012
Contextual menus (text only)430
Contextual menus (with icons or widgets)432
Separate widgets with immediate action (toolbars)052
Widgets next to rows, columns or cells, with immediate action (e.g, crossets)452
Direct manipulation555

UI SPATIAL DIRECTNESS

The spatial directness score averaged over all implemented software features.

UI TEMPORAL DIRECTNESS

The temporal directness score averaged over all implemented software features.

UI DEGREE OF COMPATIBILITY

The degree of compatibility score averaged over all implemented software features.

UI SUBJECTIVE USABILITY

A subjective score given by the first author to capture discoverability, ease of use, and overall user experience.

UI CONSISTENCY

0.5 * (nbFeatureTypes / (nbInteractionStyles * nbDifferentWidgets)). The higher the more consistent.
with:

Sub-criteriaSub-formula
nbFeatureTypesNumber of features the software supports. Counts only one feature for multi-feature features. For example, change the encoding is one feature and the type of encoding that can be selected does not count. The higher the more complete.
nbInteractionStylesNumber of interaction styles in the software. The minimum is one, and the maximum is 8 (see Interaction styles). The smaller the more consistent.
nbDifferentWidgetsCounts the number of widget types the software uses (e.g., menus, buttons, dialogs, textfields). The smaller the more consistent.

ANIMATED TRANSITIONS

number of features in the software using animated transitions / number of features in the software

FEATURES - ENCODING

DATA TYPES SUPPORTED

  • 1 point for binary
  • 1 point for quantitative
  • 1 point for qualitative

NB OF ENCODINGS

Number of cell encodings supported that are compatible with Bertin:

  • 1 point for text encoding
  • 1 point for circle encoding
  • 1 point for line encoding
  • 1 point for grayscale encoding
  • 1 point for each of the 4 different barchart encodings.
    Note: we added grayscale because many software only provide this encoding

CHANGE ROW/COL ENCODING

  • 0: not available
  • 1: only globally
  • 2: locally

DATA CONDITIONING

  • 1 point for range (specify min/max values)
  • 1 point for steps (specify the number of steps of the scale, i.e. discretize)
  • 1 point for non-linear transform (e.g., log scale)
  • 1 point for negation (value = 1 - normalizedValue)

SHAPE ORIENTATION

  • 0: not available
  • 1: only globally
  • 2: locally

SPECIFY HEADERS

  • 0: cannot dynamically set the headers
  • 1: can select which rows and columns are headers at the very beginning (when loading the dataset)
  • 2: can set rows/columns as headers dynamically
FEATURES - LAYOUT

ROW/COL MANUAL REORDERING

  • 1 point for row reordering
  • 1 point for column reordering

ROW/COL AUTO REORDERING

  • 0: not available
  • 1: reordering on both rows and columns simultaneously
  • 2: can reorder on either rows or columns

AUTO REORDERING OF SUBSETS

  • 0: not available
  • 1: can select a subset across one dimension
  • 2: can select a subset across two dimensions

SINGLE ROW/COL SORTING

  • 0: not available
  • 1: can sort only according to one dimension
  • 2: can sort according to both dimensions

TRANSPOSITION

0: not available 1: available

ROW/COL RESIZING

  • 0: not available
  • 1: can resize rows/columns uniformly
  • 2: can resize each row/column independently

ROW/COL SEPARATORS

  • 0: not available
  • 1: only in one dimension
  • 2: in both dimensions

ROW/COL SEPARATOR RESIZING

  • 0: not available
  • 1: can resize row/column separators uniformly
  • 2: can resize each separator independently

GLUE ROWS/COLUMNS

  • 0: not available
  • 1: available
FEATURES - COMMUNICATION

FIDELITY TO BERTIN'S STYLE

  • 1 point for each of Bertin's encodings
  • 1 point for capitalized header
  • 1 point for separators
  • 2 point for separators of different sizes (1 for local + 1 for global)
  • 2 point for row/columns of different sizes (1 for local + 1 for global)
  • 1 point for text annotations
  • 2 point for black and white only

FONTS CUSTOMIZABILITY

  • 1 point for text size
  • 1 point for text font
  • 1 point for text orientation
  • 1 point for text style (bold/italic)
  • 1 point for margins

TEXT ANNOTATION

  • 0: not available
  • 1: free annotations
  • 2: structured annotations

EXPORT CAPABILITIES

  • 1 point for bitmap (e.g., PNG, JPG)
  • 1 point for vector graphic (e.g., PS, SVG)
  • 1 point for text (e.g., XLS, CSV)

The software review data is available for download here (csv file).

License

All material on this page is CC-BY-SA. If you reuse or adapt it please reference our article and/or link to www.aviz.fr/bertifier.