@article {929,
	title = {The Making of Continuous Colormaps},
	journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
	volume = {27},
	year = {2021},
	month = {June},
	pages = {3048-3063},
	abstract = {Continuous colormaps are integral parts of many visualization techniques, such as heat-maps, surface plots, and flow visualization. Despite that the critiques of rainbow colormaps have been around and well-acknowledged for three decades, rainbow colormaps are still widely used today. One reason behind the resilience of rainbow colormaps is the lack of tools for users to create a continuous colormap that encodes semantics specific to the application concerned. In this paper, we present a web-based software system, CCC-Tool (short for Charting Continuous Colormaps) under the URL https://ccctool.com, for creating, editing, and analyzing such application-specific colormaps. We introduce the notion of {\textquotedblleft}colormap specification (CMS){\textquotedblright} that maintains the essential semantics required for defining a color mapping scheme. We provide users with a set of advanced utilities for constructing CMS{\textquoteright}s with various levels of complexity, examining their quality attributes using different plots, and exporting them to external application software. We present two case studies, demonstrating that the CCC-Tool can help domain scientists as well as visualization experts in designing semantically-rich colormaps.},
	issn = {1941-0506},
	doi = {10.1109/TVCG.2019.2961674},
	author = {Nardini, Pascal and Chen, Min and Samsel, Francesca and Bujack, Roxana and B{\"o}ttinger, Michael and Scheuermann, Gerik}
}
