1. Introduction and Motivation

1.5. Survey Scope

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of this state-of-the-art report, we require a well-defined scope to ensure that the most relevant research is included. The scope encompasses academic research that has emphasis placed on state-of-the-art visualisation for the purposes of business data exploration. The quality of the visual design must be regarded as state-of-the-art – and the motivation behind the research must focus on business data.

Many conferences and journals publish articles which include visualisation of business data but do not focus on novel visual design aspects of the research. Papers published in visualisation journals are a valuable source for our literature scope. Non-visualisation journal and conference papers are only in scope if the focus of the research is visualisation-oriented with the ultimate goal of better understanding the business data for informing the decision-making process.

The primary source of in-scope research comes from the conferences and journals that make visualisation the subject of their publishings. The conference proceedings of IEEE VIS and EuroVis, or the IEEE TVCG and CGF journal contain a wealth of publications that focus their attention on business data. These papers are considered the primary driving force behind the evolution of the field. See Table 3.


1.5.1. Out of Scope

Publication venues such as the conference "Software Engineering and Service Science" (ICSESS) may publish papers that include visualisation of business data but do not place emphasis on novel visual design or value. For example, in a paper entitled "Visualizations-based Analysis of Telco Data for Business Intelligence", Ashraf and Khan designed imagery to represent telecommunications data. However, these images come in the form of a pie chart and a radar chart where most of the analysis is performed through a numerical calculation. We do not include papers like this in the scope due to the limited visual component of the research.

IT Journals such as "IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology" also fall within this category. A paper entitled "Prototype of New Business process Visualization Tool" by Nagai et al. presents methods for visualising business process data through network diagrams. However, these diagrams are not considered state-of-the-art and therefore are not included in the scope.

Papers we consider to be borderline might have good potential in the field of business visualisation and often mention this as a valid application, however, they do not focus on the business aspect. For example, Wu et al. created an opinion-based visual design from social media data which shows valuable public opinion on products but also on non-business based events such as WWII and political scandals. Because of the tenuous connection, we do not include this within scope.

The topic of social media falls outside of the scope of this survey. Including it would make the survey too large. We refer readers to Wanner et al. for an existing survey on this topic.


1.5.2. In Scope

It is possible for papers in cross-disciplinary journals to be within scope, only if the visualisations used are state-of-the-art or add additional value to the visualisation literature. For example, the journal "Expert Systems with Applications" published Hanafizadeh and Mirzazadeh's "Visualizing market segmentation using self-organizing maps and Fuzzy Delphi method-ADSL market of a telecommunication company", where advanced visual methods are used with emphasis placed on the contribution of the visualisation within a business context. A further example of an in-scope paper comes from the proceedings of the "International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology" in a paper by Ziegler et al. entitled "Mining and Exploring Unstructured Customer Feedback Data Using Language Models and Treemap Visualizations" where customer feedback data are structured in a specialised treemap. This falls within scope due to the focus on the customised treemap design and the novel features implemented in the software.

The main body of publications in this survey was obtained from the major visualisation publication venues. However, the "business" component of each paper is more complicated to define. To clarify this aspect of the scope, we impose a heuristic that a business related subject has to be mentioned in the title or abstract of the paper. A case study alone is not enough to fall within scope. For an overview of the business-related subjects, please refer to the literature search methodology in Section 1.4.