Integrative Visual Abstraction of Molecular Data – ILLUSTRARE

The essential building block of visualization is the phenomenon of visual abstraction. While visual abstraction is intuitively understood, there is no scientific theory associated with it that would be useful in the visualization synthesis process. Our central aim of this project is thus to gain better understanding of the visual abstraction characteristics. We lay down a hypothetical initial basis of theoretical foundations of visual abstractions in the proposal. We hypothesize that visual abstraction is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be spanned by axes of abstraction. Besides abstractions associated with a static structure we take a closer look at abstractions related to dynamics, procedures, and emergence of the structure. We also study abstraction characteristics related to multi-scale phenomena defined both in space and in time.
This hypothetical basis will be either supported or rejected by means of exemplary evidence from specific application domain of structural biology. Structural biology data is very complex, it includes the aspect of emergence and it is defined over multiple scales. Furthermore, abstraction has led to key discoveries in biology, such as the organization of the DNA. We will study the multiscale visual abstraction characteristics on the visualization of long nucleic strands and the abstractions that convey emerging phenomena on visualization of molecular machinery use cases. From these two fields we will work toward a theory of visual abstraction in a bottom-up manner, investigating the validity of the theory in other application domains as well.