In the age of big data, interactive data visualizations are becoming increasingly prevalent. The ability to focus on subsets of data is essential for exploring large temporal, geospatial, topical, and network datasets. In order to categorize all parts of data visualizations, various attempts have been made to build frameworks for how to interpret,…

Science on a Sphere (SoS) is a compelling educational display installed at numerous museums and planetariums around the world; essentially the SoS display is a large spherical surface on which multicolor high-resolution depictions of (e.g.) planetary weather maps may be depicted. Fascinating as the SoS display is, however, it is in practice…

This dissertation explores the use of geometric and graphical models for a variety of information search and filtering applications. These models serve to provide an intuitive understanding of the problem domains and as well as computational efficiencies to our solution approaches. We begin by considering a search and rescue scenario where both…