A user-centred approach to information visualisation in nano-health

AbstractStudying the Nanomaterial Environmental Impact NEI is a critical task in nano-health and safety. However, there is a lack of visual analytic tools that can efficiently query and present large-scale bibliography metadata, NEI characterisations and nanomaterial toxicity. This paper presents the user-centred design and implementation efforts of developing the Information Visualisation InfoVis module for NEI studies. We first describe a user-centred design approach to task analysis, visual representation selection and iterative validation and improvement. We then show how existing techniques, such as graph simplification, enriched visualisation algorithms and interactive features, can be usefully combined to aid users in gaining insights. We implement our techniques as a Drupal module, and demonstrate the utility of InfoVis through scenarios of constructing co-authorship network, nanomaterial terms co-occurrence network, NanoParticle Ontology tree and nanomaterial toxicity plot. Our design is supportive for analysts and researchers to identify concepts and relationships in NEI studies.