Abstract — We describe the design and deployment of Many Eyes, a public web site where users may upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on discussions. The goal of the site is to support collaboration around visualizations at a large scale by fostering a social style of data analysis in which visualizations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a medium to spur discussion among users. To support this goal, the site includes novel mechanisms for end-user creation of visualizations and asynchronous collaboration around those visualizations. In addition to describing these technologies, we provide a preliminary report on the activity of our users.

Direct manipulation of visualizations is a powerful technique for performing exploratory data operations such as navigation, aggregation, and filtering. Its immediacy facilitates rapid, incremental, and reversible forays into the data. However it does not provide for reuse or modification of exploration sessions. This paper describes a visual query language, VQE, that adds these capabilities to a direct manipulation exploration environment called Visage. Queries and visualizations are dynamically linked: operations on either one immediately update the other, in contrast to the feedforward sequence of database query followed by visualization of results common in traditional systems. These features are supported by the architectural concept of threads, which represent a sequence of navigation steps on particular objects. Because they are tied to particular data objects, they can be directly manipulated. Because they represent operations, they can be generalized into queries. We expect t...

Exploratory data analysis is a process of sifting through data in search of interesting information or patterns. Analysts' current tools for exploring data include database management systems, statistical analysis packages, data mining tools, visualization tools, and report generators. Since the exploration process seeks the unexpected in a data-driven manner, it is crucial that these tools are seamlessly integrated so analysts can flexibly select and compose tools to use at each stage of analysis. Few systems have integrated all these capabilities either architecturally or at the user interface level. Visage's information-centric approach allows coordination among multiple application user interfaces. It uses an architecture that keeps track of the mapping of visual objects to information in shared databases. One result is the ability to perform direct manipulation operations such as drag-and-drop transfer of data among applications. This paper describes Visage's Vis...

We present an evaluation framework in which the effectiveness of evaluative arguments can be measured with real users. The framework is based on the task-efficacy evaluation method. An evaluative argument is presented in the context of a decision task and measures related to its effectiveness are assessed. Within this framework, we are currently running a formal experiment to verify whether argument effectiveness can be increased by tailoring the argument to the user and by varying the degree of argument conciseness.

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In this paper, we focus on some of the key design decisions we faced during the process of architecting a visualization system and present some possible choices, with their associated advantages and disadvantages. We frame this discussion within the context of Rivet, our general visualization environment designed for rapidly prototyping interactive, exploratory visualization tools for analysis. As we designed increasingly sophisticated visualizations, we needed to refine Rivet in order to be able to create these richer displays for larger and more complex data sets. The design

Dynamic Queries offer continuous feedback during range queries, and have been shown to be effective and satisfying. Recent work has extended them to datasets of 100,000 objects and, separately, to queries involving relations among multiple objects. The latter work enables filtering houses by properties of their owners, for instance. Our primary concern is providing feedback from histograms during Dynamic Query. The height of each histogram bar shows the count of selected objects whose attribute value falls into a given range. Unfortunately, previous efficient algorithms for single object queries overcount in the case of multiple objects if, for instance, a house has multiple owners. This paper presents an efficient algorithm that with high probability closely approximates the true counts. 1. Previous Dynamic Query work 1.1. Single Object Interface Figure 1 shows a Dynamic Query (DQ) interface as implemented in VQE, a Visual Query Environment for exploring data from a database [1]. ...

Relational databases provide significant flexibility to organize, store, and manipulate an infinite variety of complex data collections. This flexibility is enabled by the concept of relational data schemas, which allow data owners to easily design custom databases according to their unique needs. However, user interfaces and information visualizations for accessing and utilizing databases have not kept pace with this level of flexibility. Visualizations need to integrate multiple tables and diverse visualization tools into custom solutions. This paper describes advances to Snap-Together Visualization, introduces Visualization Schemas, and presents an extensible system architecture. The Snap model for custom multiple-view visualization establishes an analogy to the relational data model, enabling coordinated data design and visualization design. Visualization Schemas are a natural extension to data schemas, and provide a user interface that enables data owners to rapidly construct and disseminate custom visualizations without programming. The web-based software architecture supports run-time extensibility, enabling end-user integration and dissemination of diverse data and visualization tools from the field.

Increasingly, speech input and/or speech output is being used in combination with other modalities for the representation and exchange of information with, or mediated by, computer systems. Therefore, a growing number of developers of systems and interfaces are faced with the question of whether or not to use speech input and/or speech output in multimodal combinations for the applications they are about to build. This paper presents first results on speech in multimodal systems from a test of a theory-based approach to speech functionality. The test used a large corpus of claims about speech functionality derived from the recent literature.

The ability to quickly explore and compare multiple scenarios is an important component of exploratory data analysis. Yet today’s interfaces cannot represent alternative exploration paths as a branching history, forcing the user to recognize conceptual branch points in a linear history. Further, the interface can only show information from one state at a time, forcing the user to use her memory to compare scenarios. Our system includes a tree-structured visualization for navigating across time and scenarios. The visualization also allows browsing the history and selectively undoing/redoing events within a scenario or across scenarios. It uses the AI formalism of contexts to maintain multiple, possibly mutually inconsistent, knowledge base states. Cross-context formulas can be written for explicit scenario comparison, including visualizations of scenario differences.