Abstract Reasoning

Abstract Reasoning is a methodology for visual analytics (VA) researchers and practitioners to deliberate many different possible causal relations, such as between symptoms and causes, between causes and remedies, and between remedies and side-effects based only on the 24 abtsract entities. One reason for using this methodology is because currently we do not have a mature ontology that provides relatively compressive lists of symptoms, causes, remedies, and side-effects, and it will take many years or decades before such an ontology becomes a reliable source for VA researchers and practitioners to search for concrete entities that can easily be related to instances in real world applications. Another reason is because that the space of abstract reasoning is much smaller than the space of reasoning with concrete entities. Although it will take some effort to become accustomed to the 24 abstract entities, the effort for analysing or evaluating a design or a system is much more scalable and the process is therefore easily manageable and time-efficient.