Annotations As A Support For Knowledge Generation Supporting Visual Analytics In The Field Of Ophthalmology

While visual analytics (VA) supports the appraisal of large data amounts, annotations support the amendment of additional information to the VA system. Despite the fact that annotations have occasionally been used to facilitate the analysis, a thorough investigation of annotations themselves is challenging. Although they can represent a suitable way to transfer additional information into the visualization system, there is the need to characterize annotations in order to assure an appropriate use. With our paper we provide a characteristic for annotations, revealing and depicting key issues for the use of annotations. By supplementary fitting our characteristic into the knowledge generation model from Sacha et al. (2014), we provide a systematic view on annotations. We show the general applicability of our characteristic of annotations with a visual analytics approach on medical data in the field of ophthalmology.