Map or Gantt? Which Diagram Helps Viewers Best in Spatio-Temporal Data Exploration Tasks?

In this paper we investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of two two-dimensional static visual representations of spatio-temporal data, a map-based and a Gantt-based diagram, in their support of various information retrieval tasks. The map-based diagram is characterized by a natural spatial arrangement of locations on a schematic map. The Gantt-based one represents time naturally as a linearly ordered set of time intervals from left to right. A within-subject empirical experiment has been conducted, in which participants were asked to verify queries about persons, locations, and time intervals. The formulation of the queries was based on (i) Bertin’s three reading levels, (ii) certain cognitive operations, and (iii) different syntactic orders of expressions denoting persons, locations and times. Response correctness and response time were recorded. With respect to response accuracy, both diagrams support viewers well in nearly all information retrieval tasks. Regarding efficiency, the map-based diagram elicited significantly faster response times than the Gantt-based one, except for queries with time in focus. The results suggest that map-based diagrams require less search and reasoning effort of viewers to retrieve the information asked for in the task types used in this study.</p

Business process variant analysis based on mutual fingerprints of event logs

Comparing business process variants using event logs is a common use case in process mining. Existing techniques for process variant analysis detect statistically-significant differences between variants at the level of individual entities (such as process activities) and their relationships (e.g. directly-follows relations between activities). This may lead to a proliferation of differences due to the low level of granularity in which such differences are captured. This paper presents a novel approach to detect statistically-significant differences between variants at the level of entire process traces (i.e. sequences of directly-follows relations). The cornerstone of this approach is a technique to learn a directly-follows graph called mutual fingerprint from the event logs of the two variants. A mutual fingerprint is a lossless encoding of a set of traces and their duration using discrete wavelet transformation. This structure facilitates the understanding of statistical differences along the control-flow and performance dimensions. The approach has been evaluated using real-life event logs against two baselines. The results show that at a trace level, the baselines cannot always reveal the differences discovered by our approach, or can detect spurious differences.This research is partly funded by the Australian Research Council (DP180102839) and Spanish funds MINECO and FEDER (TIN2017-86727-C2-1-R).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enabling a User-Friendly Visualization of Business Process Models

Abstract. Enterprises are facing increasingly complex business pro-cesses. Engineering processes in the automotive domain, for example, may comprise hundreds or thousands of process tasks. In such a scenario, existing modeling notations do not always allow for a user-friendly pro-cess visualization. In turn, this hampers the comprehensibility of business processes, especially for non-experienced process participants. This paper tackles this challenge by suggesting alternative ways of visualizing large and complex process models. A controlled experiment with 22 subjects provides first insights into how users perceive these approaches. Key words: process visualization, user experiment, visual design

Visualisation of trip chaining behaviour and mode choice using household travel survey data

202204 bcrcAccepted ManuscriptSelf-fundedPublishe

Lost my way:an educational geometry game for young children

\u3cp\u3ePlayful activities are regarded to be a promising way for fostering children's geometric thinking and understanding. In this paper we introduce Lost My Way, an educational game about geometric transformations targeted at middle school children of about 10 years of age. We describe the design of the game and report preliminary results and experiences gained from the first two stages of our iterative development process which included a playtesting session and an on-site evaluation at a local middle school.\u3c/p\u3

Process visualization techniques for multi-perspective process comparisons

Organizations executing similar business processes need to understand the differences and similarities in activities performed across work environments. Presently, research interest is directed towards the potential of visualization for the display of process models, to support users in their analysis tasks. Although recent literature in process mining and comparison provide several methods and algorithms to perform process and log comparison, few contributions explore novel visualization approaches. This paper analyses process comparison from a design perspective, providing some practical visualization techniques as anal- ysis solutions (/to support process analysis). The design of the visual comparison has been tackled through three different points of view: the general model, the projected model and the side-by-side comparison in order to support the needs of business analysts. A case study is presented showing the application of process mining and visualization techniques to patient treatment across two Australian hospitals

Comparing business process variants using models and event logs

Organizations realize that benefits can be achieved by closely working together on the design of their business processes. But even when there is a joint design for a particular business process, the way individual organizations carry out that process may differ – either wittingly or unwittingly. This paper proposes an analytical approach that helps to compare how different organizations execute essentially the same process. This comparison is based on the alignment of recorded process behavior with explicitly defined process models. The distinctive feature of the proposed approach is that it supports the comparison of the actual execution of a process within a particular organization with its intended design, as well as with the variants of that design by other organizations. In this way, organizations can develop a better understanding of how they can work together and further standardize a process of common interest. We include an industrial case study from the context of the CoSeLoG project to demonstrate the value of this comparison approach