RSATree: Distribution-Aware Data Representation of Large-Scale Tabular Datasets for Flexible Visual Query

A survey of urban visual analytics: Advances and future directions

Developing effective visual analytics systems demands care in characterization of domain problems and integration of visualization techniques and computational models. Urban visual analytics has already achieved remarkable success in tackling urban problems and providing fundamental services for smart cities. To promote further academic research and assist the development of industrial urban analytics systems, we comprehensively review urban visual analytics studies from four perspectives. In particular, we identify 8 urban domains and 22 types of popular visualization, analyze 7 types of computational method, and categorize existing systems into 4 types based on their integration of visualization techniques and computational models. We conclude with potential research directions and opportunities.

DDLVis: Real-time Visual Query of Spatiotemporal Data Distribution via Density Dictionary Learning

Visual query of spatiotemporal data is becoming an increasingly important function in visual analytics applications. Various works have been presented for querying large spatiotemporal data in real time. However, the real-time query of spatiotemporal data distribution is still an open challenge. As spatiotemporal data become larger, methods of aggregation, storage and querying become critical. We propose a new visual query system that creates a low-memory storage component and provides real-time visual interactions of spatiotemporal data. We first present a peak-based kernel density estimation method to produce the data distribution for the spatiotemporal data. Then a novel density dictionary learning approach is proposed to compress temporal density maps and accelerate the query calculation. Moreover, various intuitive query interactions are presented to interactively gain patterns. The experimental results obtained on three datasets demonstrate that the presented system offers an effective query for visual analytics of spatiotemporal data.

Uncertainty-Oriented Ensemble Data Visualization and Exploration using Variable Spatial Spreading

As an important method of handling potential uncertainties in numerical simulations, ensemble simulation has been widely applied in many disciplines. Visualization is a promising and powerful ensemble simulation analysis method. However, conventional visualization methods mainly aim at data simplification and highlighting important information based on domain expertise instead of providing a flexible data exploration and intervention mechanism. Trial-and-error procedures have to be repeatedly conducted by such approaches. To resolve this issue, we propose a new perspective of ensemble data analysis using the attribute variable dimension as the primary analysis dimension. Particularly, we propose a variable uncertainty calculation method based on variable spatial spreading. Based on this method, we design an interactive ensemble analysis framework that provides a flexible interactive exploration of the ensemble data. Particularly, the proposed spreading curve view, the region stability heat map view, and the temporal analysis view, together with the commonly used 2D map view, jointly support uncertainty distribution perception, region selection, and temporal analysis, as well as other analysis requirements. We verify our approach by analyzing a real-world ensemble simulation dataset. Feedback collected from domain experts confirms the efficacy of our framework.

A Structured Review of Data Management Technology for Interactive Visualization and Analysis

In the last two decades, interactive visualization and analysis have become a central tool in data-driven decision making. Concurrently to the contributions in data visualization, research in data management has produced technology that directly benefits interactive analysis. Here, we contribute a systematic review of 30 years of work in this adjacent field, and highlight techniques and principles we believe to be underappreciated in visualization work. We structure our review along two axes. First, we use task taxonomies from the visualization literature to structure the space of interactions in usual systems. Second, we created a categorization of data management work that strikes a balance between specificity and generality. Concretely, we contribute a characterization of 131 research papers along these two axes. We find that five notions in data management venues fit interactive visualization systems well: materialized views, approximate query processing, user modeling and query prediction, muiti-query optimization, lineage techniques, and indexing techniques. In addition, we find a preponderance of work in materialized views and approximate query processing, most targeting a limited subset of the interaction tasks in the taxonomy we used. This suggests natural avenues of future research both in visualization and data management. Our categorization both changes how we visualization researchers design and build our systems, and highlights where future work is necessary.