Exploring the design space of composite visualization

We propose the notion of composite visualization views (CVVs) as a theoretical model that unifies the existing coordinated multiple views (CMV) paradigm with other strategies for combining visual representations in the same geometrical space. We identify five such strategies -- called CVV design patterns -- based on an extensive review of the literature in composite visualization. We go on to show how these design patterns can all be expressed in terms of a design space describing the correlation between two visualizations in terms of spatial mapping as well as the data relationships between items in the visualizations. We also discuss how to use this design space to suggest potential directions for future research.