A spreadsheet interface for visualization exploration

As the size and complexity of data sets continues to increase, the development of user interfaces and interaction techniques that expedite the process of exploring that data must receive new attention. Regardless of the speed of rendering, it is important to coherently organize the visual process of exploration: this information both grants insights about the data to a user and can be used by collaborators to understand the results. To fulfil these needs, we present a spreadsheet-like interface to data exploration. The interface displays a 2-dimensional window into visualization parameter space which users manipulate as they search for desired results. Through tabular organization and a clear correspondence between parameters and results, the interface eases the discovery, comparison and analysis of the underlying data. Users can utilize operators and the integrated interpreter to further explore and automate the visualization process; using a method introduced in this paper, these operations can be applied to cells in different stacks of the interface. Via illustrations using a variety of data sets, we demonstrate the efficacy of this novel interface.

[1]  Gregg Rothermel,et al.  Scaling up a "What you see is what you test" methodology to spreadsheet grids , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.

[2]  Paul A. Beardsley,et al.  Design galleries: a general approach to setting parameters for computer graphics and animation , 1997, SIGGRAPH.

[3]  Jonathan J. Cadiz,et al.  A seamless integration of algorithm animation into a visual programming language , 1996, AVI '96.

[4]  G. Kindlmann,et al.  Semi-automatic generation of transfer functions for direct volume rendering , 1998, IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization (Cat. No.989EX300).

[5]  Marc Levoy,et al.  Spreadsheets for images , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Steve Kubica,et al.  Cantata: visual programming environment for the Khoros system , 1995, COMG.

[7]  David H. Laidlaw,et al.  The application visualization system: a computational environment for scientific visualization , 1989, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[8]  Margaret M. Burnett,et al.  Interactive Visual Data Abstraction in a Declarative Visual Programming Language , 1994, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[9]  Lloyd Treinish,et al.  An extended data-flow architecture for data analysis and visualization , 1995, COMG.

[10]  Jim Hugunin.  Python and Java: The Best of Both Worlds , 1997 .

[11]  Kwan-Liu Ma,et al.  Image graphs-a novel approach to visual data exploration , 1999, Proceedings Visualization '99 (Cat. No.99CB37067).

[12]  Hanspeter Pfister,et al.  The VolumePro real-time ray-casting system , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[13]  Margaret M. Burnett,et al.  Representation Design Benchmarks: A Design-Time Aid for VPL Navigable Static Representations , 1997, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[14]  Bay-Wei Chang,et al.  Fluid visualization of spreadsheet structures , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (Cat. No.98TB100254).

[15]  E.H. Chi,et al.  Principles for Information Visualization Spreadsheets , 1998, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[16]  Kannappan Palaniappan,et al.  A high performance Interactive Image Spreadsheet (IISS) , 1994 .