Toward flexible visual analytics augmented through smooth display transitions

Visualizing big and complex multivariate data is challenging. To address this challenge, we propose flexible visual analytics (FVA) with the aim to mitigate visual complexity and interaction complexity challenges in visual analytics, while maintaining the strengths of multiple perspectives on the studied data. At the heart of our proposed approach are transitions that fluidly transform data between user-relevant views to offer various perspectives and insights into the data. While smooth display transitions have been already proposed, there has not yet been an interdisciplinary discussion to systematically conceptualize and formalize these ideas. As a call to further action, we argue that future research is necessary to develop a conceptual framework for flexible visual analytics. We discuss preliminary ideas for prioritizing multi-aspect visual representations and multi-aspect transitions between them, and consider the display user for whom such depictions are produced and made available for visual analytics. With this contribution we aim to further facilitate visual analytics on complex data sets for varying data exploration tasks and purposes based on different user characteristics and data use contexts

Visual analytics for sets over time and space

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 19192 “Visual Analytics for Sets over Time and Space”, which brought together 29 researchers working on visualization(i) from a theoretical point of view (graphdrawing, computational geometry, and cognition (ii) from a temporal point of view (visual analytics and information visualization overtime, HCI), and (iii) from a space-time point of view (cartography, GIScience). The goal of the seminar was to identify specific theoretical and practical problems that need to be solved in order to create dynamic and interactive set visualizations that take into account time and space, and to begin working on these problems. The first 1.5 days were reserved for overview presentations from representatives of the different communities, for presenting open problems, and for forming interdisciplinary working groups that would focus on some of the identified open problems as a group. There were three survey talks, ten short talks, and one panel with three contributors. The remaining three days consisted of open mic sessions, working-group meetings, and progress reports. Five working groups were formed that investigated several of the open research questions. Abstracts of the talks and a report from each working group are included in this report