Event-Based Concepts for User-Driven Visualization

Visualization has become an increasingly important tool to support exploration and analysis of the large volumes of data we are facing today. However, interests and needs of users are still not being considered sufficiently. The goal of this work is to shift the user into the focus. To that end, we apply the concept of event-based visualization that combines event-based methodology and visualization technology. Previous approaches that make use of events are mostly specific to a particular application case, and hence, can not be applied otherwise. We introduce a novel general model of event-based visualization that comprises three fundamental stages. (1) Users are enabled to specify what their interests are. (2) During visualization, matches of these interests are sought in the data. (3) It is then possible to automatically adjust visual representations according to the detected matches. This way, it is possible to generate visual representations that better reflect what users need for their task at hand. The model's generality allows its application in many visualization contexts. We substantiate the general model with specific data-driven events that focus on relational data so prevalent in today's visualization scenarios. We show how the developed methods and concepts can be implemented in an interactive event-based visualization framework, which includes event-enhanced visualizations for temporal and spatio-temporal data.