Abstract—This design paper presents new guidance for creating map legends in a dynamic environment. Our contribution is a set of guidelines for legend design in a visualization context and a series of illustrative themes through which they may be expressed. These are demonstrated in an applications context through interactive software prototypes. The guidelines are derived from cartographic literature and in liaison with EDINA who provide digital mapping services for UK tertiary education. They enhance approaches to legend design that have evolved for static media with visualization by considering: selection, layout, symbols, position, dynamism and design and process. Broad visualization legend themes include: The Ground Truth Legend, The Legend as Statistical Graphic and The Map is the Legend. Together, these concepts enable us to augment legends with dynamic properties that address specific needs, rethink their nature and role and contribute to a wider re-evaluation of maps as artifacts of usage rather than statements of fact. EDINA has acquired funding to enhance their clients with visualization legends that use these concepts as a consequence of this work. The guidance applies to the design of a wide range of legends and keys used in cartography and information visualization. Index Terms—Cartography, design, Digimap service, legend, online web mapping, visualization. 1

Our visual analytics tool GeneTracer, developed for the VAST 2010 genetic sequence mini challenge, visualizes gene sequences of current outbreaks and native sequences along with disease characteristics. We successfully used GeneTracer in combination with data mining techniques to solve the challenge.

For hierarchical clustering, dendrograms provide convenient and powerful visualization. Although many visualization methods have been suggested for partitional clustering, their usefulness deteriorates quickly with increasing dimensionality of the data and/or they fail to represent structure between and within clusters simultaneously. In this paper we extend (dissimilarity) matrix shading with several reordering steps based on seriation. Both methods, matrix shading and seriation, have been well-known for a long time. However, only recent algorithmic improvements allow to use seriation for larger problems. Furthermore, seriation is used in a novel stepwise process (within each cluster and between clusters) which leads to a visualization technique that is independent of the dimensionality of the data. A big advantage is that it presents the structure between clusters and the micro-structure within clusters in one concise plot. This not only allows for judging cluster quality but also makes mis-specification of the number of clusters apparent. We give a detailed discussion of the construction of dissimilarity plots and demonstrate their usefulness with several examples.