User Study on a Multi-view Environment to Identify Differences Between Biological Taxonomies

The classification of living organisms is essential to understand biodiversity and, therefore, to support its conservation. The taxonomic system classifies living organisms into hierarchically organized groups. Classification is not always a simple task, as even today taxonomists face the challenge that data are frequently revised, and species may be reclassified into other groups. Visualization of hierarchies, particularly biological taxonomies, has been a relevant area of research to support this challenge. Previous user studies determined that expert taxonomists preferred the edge-drawing method to visualize changes between two versions of a taxonomy, using the tool called Diaforá, which presents a single view. In this paper we propose a visualization that consists of using the coordinated multiple view (CMV) technique and focuses on displaying only the differences between two alternative versions of a biological taxonomy. The hypothesis is that the proposed visualization would provide a better cognitive approach to users, facilitating the identification of taxonomic changes. The work consisted first in designing other views and, through a user study, selecting one of them to be integrated into Diaforá to form a CMV system. Then, a second user study was carried out to contrast the original version of Diaforá with its extended version. Participants performed a series of tasks and we obtained measures of effectiveness, efficiency, trust rate and overall engagement rate. Results indicate that multiple coordinated views (CMV) improved users’ performance in identifying differences.