Visual Exploration of Temporal Object Databases

Two complementary families of users’ tasks may be identified during database visualization: data browsing and data analysis. On the one hand, data browsing involves extensively exploring a subset of the database using navigational interaction techniques. Classical object database browsers provide means for navigating within a collection of objects and amongst objects by way of their relationships. In temporal object databases, these techniques are not sufficient to adequately support time-related tasks, such as studying a snapshot of a collection of objects at a given instant, or detecting changes within temporal attributes and relationships. Visual data analysis on the other hand, is dedicated to the extraction of valuable knowledge by exploiting the human visual perception capabilities. In temporal databases, examples of data analysis tasks include observing the layout of a history, detecting regularities and trends, and comparing the evolution of the values taken by two or more histories. In this paper, we identify several users’ tasks related to temporal database exploration, and we propose three novel visualization techniques addressing them. The first of them is dedicated to temporal object browsing, while the two others are oriented towards the analysis of quantitative histories. All three techniques are shown to satisfy several ergonomic properties.

[1]  Chris North,et al.  Temporal, geographical and categorical aggregations viewed through coordinated displays: a case study with highway incident data , 1999, NPIVM '99.

[2]  Edward R. Tufte,et al.  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. , 1983 .

[3]  Jacques Bertin,et al.  Graphics and graphic information-processing , 1981 .

[4]  Laurence Nigay,et al.  Design method of interaction techniques for large information spaces , 1998, AVI '98.

[5]  Ramez Elmasri,et al.  The Consensus Glossary of Temporal Database Concepts - February 1998 Version , 1997, Temporal Databases, Dagstuhl.

[6]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  LifeLines: visualizing personal histories , 1996, CHI.

[7]  Arie Segev,et al.  A consensus glossary of temporal database concepts , 1994, SIGMOD 1994.

[8]  Hans-Peter Kriegel,et al.  OPTICS: ordering points to identify the clustering structure , 1999, SIGMOD '99.

[9]  P. Fayers,et al.  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , 1990 .

[10]  Edward Rolf Tufte,et al.  The visual display of quantitative information , 1985 .

[11]  Laura M. Haas,et al.  PESTO : An Integrated Query/Browser for Object Databases , 1996, VLDB.

[12]  Hans-Peter Kriegel,et al.  Visual classification: an interactive approach to decision tree construction , 1999, KDD '99.

[13]  Narain H. Gehani,et al.  Queries in an Object-Oriented Graphical Interface , 1995, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[14]  Tiziana Catarci,et al.  Visual query operators for temporal databases , 1997, Proceedings of TIME '97: 4th International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning.

[15]  Stefano Spaccapietra,et al.  SUPER: Visual Interfaces for Object+Relationship Data Models , 1995, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[16]  Marie-Christine Fauvet,et al.  Applying temporal databases to geographical data analysis , 1999, Proceedings. Tenth International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 99.

[17]  Patrick Borras,et al.  Building User Interfaces with Looks , 1992, Building an Object-Oriented Database System, The Story of O2.

[18]  Jock D. Mackinlay,et al.  The perspective wall: detail and context smoothly integrated , 1991, CHI.

[19]  Manojit Sarkar,et al.  Graphical fisheye views of graphs , 1992, CHI.

[20]  Tiziana Catarci,et al.  Visual Query Systems for Databases: A Survey , 1997, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[21]  Ramez Elmasri,et al.  A consensus glossary of temporal database concepts , 1994, SGMD.

[22]  Yuval Shahar,et al.  Intelligent visualization and exploration of time-oriented clinical data , 1999, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. 1999. HICSS-32. Abstracts and CD-ROM of Full Papers.

[23]  Shaul Dar,et al.  DTL's DataSpot: database exploration as easy as browsing the Web… , 1998, SIGMOD '98.

[24]  Marie-Christine Fauvet,et al.  A Representation-Independent Temporal Extension of ODMG's Object Query Language , 1999, Proc. 15èmes Journées Bases de Données Avancées, BDA.

[25]  John V. Carlis,et al.  Interactive visualization of serial periodic data , 1998, UIST '98.

[26]  Gilbert Cockton,et al.  Design Principles for Interactive Software , 1997, IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing.