Preattentive visualization of information relevance

When presenting complex, multidimensional data to users, emphasis of relevant information plays an important role. Especially when data is arranged according to several criteria, the simultaneous use of multiple visualization metaphors frequently results in information overload and unintuitive visualizations. In this paper, we present a comparison of preattentive visual features specifically for highlighting relevance of data extracted from electronic documents in an information-rich virtual environment. Several visual cues were evaluated with regard to their effectivity, comprehensibility and influence on other visualized features. At the same time we introduce two innovative data handling techniques to achieve practical applicability of our system: An intuitive way to reduce visual cluttering of information by filtering information based on its visual depth and a way to efficiently utilize visualizations of different dimensions - dimensional congruence.