Inspector Gadget: Integrating Data Preprocessing and Orchestration in the Visual Analysis Loop

Abstract

Nowadays, tracking devices are small and cheap. For analysis tasks, there is no problem to obtain sufficient amounts of data. The challenge is how to make sense of the data, which often contain complex situations. Multiple data sources related to time, space, and other dimensions, with different resolution and notation have to be mapped. Visual approaches often cover an analysis loop that starts right after the preprocessing. In this paper, we contribute methods to explicitly integrate data preprocessing and orchestration into the visual analysis loop. Subsequently, the big picture can be explored in detail and hypotheses can be created, refined, and validated. We showcase our approach with multiple heterogeneous datasets from the VAST Challenge 2014.