With the public sector facing unprecedented cutbacks, it’s increasingly important for local authorities to understand how satisfied their residents are with local services and engage them in the assessment of whether limited budgets are being spent in the right places. City University London’s giCentre has used the emerging field of data visualization to help Leicestershire [...]

Add another online destination to find the data that you need. DataMarket launched back in May with Icelandic data, but just a few days ago relaunched with data of the international variety. They tout 100 million time series datasets and 600 million facts. I’m not totally sure what that means (100 million lines, sets of [...]

The massive amount of financial data that originates from the stock markets generates large amounts of complex financial time series data of high interest. In their VAST 2010 paper, Ziegler and colleagues from the University of Konstanz, Germany introduce two techniques and applications that support the analysis of large amounts of financial time series data [...]

Applications supporting navigation in large networks are used every days by millions of people. They include road map navigators, high route visualization systems, and network visualization systems using node-link diagrams. These applications currently provide generic interaction methods for navigation: pan-and-zoom and sometimes bird’s eye views. This project explores the idea of exploiting the connection information [...]

Social networks collected by historians or sociologists typically have a large number of attributes associated with their actors, and applying analysis algorithms to these networks will produce additional attributes such as degree, centrality, and clustering coefficients. Understanding the effects of this plethora of graph attributes is one of the main challenges in multivariate social networks. [...]

We worked with climate scientists at NCAS-Climate (University of Reading, UK) who produce large datasets of simulated storm tracks from General Circulation Models that span many decade, and need to analyse them. We collaboratively designed and implemented interactive visualisation techniques that have opened up their database, enabling storm tracks to be browsed in their spatial and temporal context, and for specific examples to be captured as Quicktime video clips. The purpose of generating these storm tracks was to better understand the spatial and temporal distribution of storms, particularly for extreme events.

In a recent paper (soon available from IEEE TVCG), we present a systematic approach to the interactive visual analysis of heterogeneous data.  The data consists of interrelated parts that are given on spatial grids over time (e.g., the atmosphere and ocean part from a coupled climate model).  By integrating both data parts in a framework [...]

One of the main Visual Analytics characteristics is the tight integration between automatic computation and interactive visualization. This generally corresponds to the availability of complex and powerful algorithms that allow for manipulating the data under analysis, transforming it in order to feed suitable visualizations. As an example, some Visual Analytics tools devoted to text analysis are based on the idea of extracting new data from the text (e.g., computing word frequencies or paragraph lengths) in order to produce visualizations that are based on these new derived pieces of information.

The adoption of Visual Analytics methodologies in security applications is an approach that could lead to interesting results. Usually, the data that has to be analyzed finds in a graphical representation its preferred nature, such as spatial or temporal relationships. Due to the nature of these applications, it is very important that key-details are made easy to identify. This article presents a visualization tool that graphically displays the movement of 82 employees of a department during an evacuation, of the building in which they were working, caused by an explosion of a bomb. Thirteen casual users were asked to identify potential suspects and observe what happened.

The overall goal of the Humanitics project, financed mainly by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is to develop visual analytics tools for public organizations to enhance collaborative knowledge discovery, information exchange and communication.

It was initiated as a collaboration between the University of Fribourg and the United Nations in Geneva. Each year, the United Nation manipulates and reports numerous data and information concerning world-wide health, illicit drug trade, environment and global climate change, diseases, energy, conflict, and humanitarian development concerns.