Abstract not found

Though data analysis tools continue to improve, analysts still expend an inordinate amount of time and effort manipulating data and assessing data quality issues. Such “data wrangling ” regularly involves reformatting data values or layout, correcting erroneous or missing values, and integrating multiple data sources. These transforms are often difficult to specify and difficult to reuse across analysis tasks, teams, and tools. In response, we introduce Wrangler, an interactive system for creating data transformations. Wrangler combines direct manipulation of visualized data with automatic inference of relevant transforms, enabling analysts to iteratively explore the space of applicable operations and preview their effects. Wrangler leverages semantic data types (e.g., geographic locations, dates, classification codes) to aid validation and type conversion. Interactive histories support review, refinement, and annotation of transformation scripts. User study results show that Wrangler significantly reduces specification time and promotes the use of robust, auditable transforms instead of manual editing.

This article describes “Obvious”: a meta-toolkit that abstracts and encapsulates information visualization toolkits implemented in the Java language. It intends to unify their use and postpone the choice of which concrete toolkit(s) to use later-on in the development of visual analytics applications. We also report on the lessons we have learned when wrapping popular toolkits with Obvious, namely Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, partly Improvise, JUNG and other data management libraries. We show several examples on the uses of Obvious, how the different toolkits can be combined, for instance sharing their data models. We also show how Weka and Rapid-Miner, two popular machine-learning toolkits, have been wrapped with Obvious and can be used directly with all the other wrapped toolkits. We expect Obvious to start a co-evolution process: Obvious is meant to evolve when more components of Information Visualization systems will become consensual. It is also designed to help information visualization systems adhere to the best practices to provide a higher level of interoperability and leverage the domain of visual analytics.

While animation has been shown to be compelling and helpful to reveal transformations of complex graphical representations such as trees or graphs, other studies have cast doubts on animation’s usefulness for learning. We present a new beneficial use of animation: helping users learn and understand the meaning of the spatial grouping of items on the screen. We introduce this technique in the design of two list comparison interfaces: Twinlist, an interface that helps physicians compare and merge two separate lists of medications into a reconciled list; and ManyLists, an interface for product comparison. Animation is used to reveal the similarities and differences between items in the lists and explain the final grouping. A controlled experiment confirmed that animation helped participants learn the groupings of Twinlist. Finally we summarize design guidelines and discuss other possible uses of the technique. Author Keywords animation, visualization, comparison

Abstract—Organizations rely on data analysts to model customer engagement, streamline operations, improve production, inform business decisions, and combat fraud. Though numerous analysis and visualization tools have been built to improve the scale and efficiency at which analysts can work, there has been little research on how analysis takes place within the social and organizational context of companies. To better understand the enterprise analysts ’ ecosystem, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 35 data analysts from 25 organizations across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, retail, marketing and finance. Based on our interview data, we characterize the process of industrial data analysis and document how organizational features of an enterprise impact it. We describe recurring pain points, outstanding challenges, and barriers to adoption for visual analytic tools. Finally, we discuss design implications and opportunities for visual analysis research. Index Terms—Data, analysis, visualization, enterprise. 1