Subjective Evaluation of Value-added in Visualization of Data

Value-added is one of the contextual information quality dimensions that depends on the nature of task and plays a role in the operational fitness and the goals to be achieved. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of how people the perceive value-added of data shown through visual representations. Single and composite visualizations are shown to users, and they are asked to provide value-added for a given task. The manner in which value-added varies appears to be heavily dependent on task. Some tasks are more believable and valuable when a single visualization is displayed than when two views are combined. Economics data is selected for the study because it alleviates the effect of the accuracy dimension on the assessment of value-added. The implication of these results is that, for subjective measures of valueadded, traditional statistical methods of assessing quality may need to be extended with additional methods to account for the non-linearity and the behavior of data integration. This study is a complement of two other studies related to research on the human perception of Information Quality, and how the Information Quality dimensions are estimated for data shown through visual representations.