A two dimensional visual environment deals with the representation of the data via the interface. A two dimensional visual environment overlaps with other visual environments when trying to classify data types. In reality, all data visualization environments are displayed on a 2-D surface. This leads to the confusion between two dimensional data representation and two dimensional data types. Two dimensional data types deal with the total number of attributes that will be included in the visual environment.
Examples are longitude and latitude, width and height, etc.
This program may give information about each city that is selected. This could be viewed as multi-dimensional because there are more than two attributes associated with the data. This example should still be viewed as 2-D because the program's main use is distinguishing and relating cities and states, in terms of position and direction to other programs. This slight distinction will be the basis for the deciding what is and is not a two dimensional data type. This project comes out of the Imaging Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.