Publikationen

Abstract

In the production industry, information about how the production process performs is very valuable to a company. Such information can be loaded and visually analyzed by Visplore, which is a software for visual analytics. As part of this master’s thesis, Visplore has been extended to support interval-based comparisons. The usability problems created by the new technique and the solutions to these problems will be presented. This is a juxtaposed (side-by-side) comparison technique, and will be explained in detail, both design-wise and implementation-wise. This technique works best on comparisons where the compared data is not similar, in comparison to a superposed (overlaid) design, which properly works on data containing only small differences. Within Visplore, this new comparison technique has been integrated in the 2D Scatter Plot and in the Horizon Graph View. In short, our juxtaposed comparison technique works by compressing the parts of the graph which are not important to the user, and expanding the areas of interest, which can then be used for a side-by-side comparison. By using the new technique it is now possible, for example, to compare the industrial production of two different days by displaying them besides each other and ignoring the rest of the data. The new interval based approach can however also help, for example, when a data set contains big gaps within the data, or many missing values. In this case, intervals are used to cut out the parts without data, to avoid wasting visual space and to show the rest of the data more detailed. Furthermore, techniques presented in other papers have been analyzed and compared to our approach.