Visualizing relationships for real world applications

To deal with real world applications, such as network management, data mining and large scale program comprehension, it is common to explore the relationships between the data entities in the data sets of these applications. An interactive visualization of these relationships is required as users need to understand and modify these relationships in a user friendly manner. We face two challenges: the data sets are large, complex and time sequenced; and there may be no predefined data model structure for the relationships. In this paper we present an interactive visualization system, the Structure Explorer, which provides: (1) a powerful modeling mechanism with built-in interactive visualization functionality; (2) a model structure that allows users to view the data model at the syntactic level, and can be used to monitor and control which parts of the data model are to be generated, visualized, manipulated and displayed; and (3) a mechanism for converting the data within a view back into the data model. Through these mechanisms users can observe the relationships from many aspects and develop the relationships interactively.