Ed Chi, John Riedl, University of Minnesota
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/infovis98/operator.pdf
This paper from the University of Minnesota provides a very rich taxonomy of operations, interactions and graphic techniques. It uses this to develop a conceptual model of all possible visualization operations, an operator framework. It discusses a variety of visualizations in the context of the authors Visualization Spreadsheet. This paper deserves review by those implementing visualizations and toolkits.