Lars Grammel

How Information Visualization Novices Construct Visualizations

It remains challenging for information visualization novices to rapidly construct visualizations during exploratory data analysis. We conducted an exploratory laboratory study in which information visualization novices explored fictitious sales data by communicating visualization specifications to a human mediator, who rapidly constructed the visualizations using commercial visualization software. We found that three activities were central to the iterative visualization construction process: data attribute selection, visual template selection, and visual mapping specification. The major barriers faced by the participants were translating questions into data attributes, designing visual mappings, and interpreting the visualizations. Partial specification was common, and the participants used simple heuristics and preferred visualizations they were already familiar with, such as bar, line and pie charts. We derived abstract models from our observations that describe barriers in the data exploration process and uncovered how information visualization novices think about visualization specifications. Our findings support the need for tools that suggest potential visualizations and support iterative refinement, that provide explanations and help with learning, and that are tightly integrated into tool support for the overall visual analytics process.

A survey of mashup development environments

This chapter presents a survey of six mashup development environments and looks at how mashups fit into the vision of the smart internet. The fast-paced expansion of mashup development environments has resulted in a wealth of features and approaches. To provide an overview of End User Development support in current mashup development environments, we explore, summarize and compare their features across six different themes (Levels of Abstraction, Learning Support, Community Support, Discoverability, User Interface Design and Software Engineering Techniques). We found that the mashup development environments provide many features to support end users, but there is still much room for further improvement, especially in relation to the smart internet. We believe that by connecting matters of concern to mashups, mashup development environments can become an essential part of the smart internet. Such a connection would enable mining of mashup elements, which could facilitate automatic mashup creation and customization.

A Survey of Visualization Construction User Interfaces

We have systematically surveyed the publications on visualization construction user interfaces that have been published in 12 major Visualization and HCI venues. We found six different visualization construction approaches (visual builder, visualization spreadsheet, textual programming, visual dataflow programming, template editor, and shelf configuration). The approaches differ in their flexibility, whether they support presentation or exploration tasks, and the spatial, temporal, and conceptual distance between the user interface (UI) and the visualization. Our results provide guidance to designers of visualization construction UIs.

Mashup environments in software engineering

Too often, software engineering (SE) tool research is focused on creating small, stand-alone tools that address rarely understood developer needs. We believe that research should instead provide developers with flexible environments and interoperable tools, and then study how developers appropriate and tailor these tools in practice. Although there has been some prior work on this, we feel that flexible tool environments for SE have not yet been fully explored. In particular, we propose adopting the Web 2.0 idea of mashups and mashup environments to support SE practitioners in analytic activities involving multiple information sources.

WorkItemExplorer: visualizing software development tasks using an interactive exploration environment

This demo introduces WorkItemExplorer, an interactive environment to visually explore data from software development tasks. WorkItemExplorer enables developers and managers to investigate activity and correlations in their task management system by making data exploration flexible and interactive, and by utilizing multiple coordinated views. Our preliminary evaluation shows that WorkItemExplorer is able to answer questions that developers ask, while also enabling them to gain new insights through the free exploration of data.

Attracting the community's many eyes: an exploration of user involvement in issue tracking

A community of users who report bugs and request features provides valuable feedback that can be used in product development. We compare the community involvement in issue tracker usage between the open source project Eclipse and the closed source project IBM Jazz to evaluate if publicly accessible issue trackers work as well in closed source projects. We find that IBM Jazz successfully receives user feedback through this channel. We then explore the differences in work item processing in IBM Jazz between team members, project members and externals. We conclude that making public issue trackers available in closed source projects is a useful approach for eliciting feedback from the community, but that work items created by team members are processed differently from work items created by project members and externals.

Creating Visualizations through Ontology Mapping

We explore how to support the creation of customized visualizations of ontology instance data through the specification of ontology mappings. We combine technologies from the disciplines of software modeling and ontology engineering. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by extending an existing ontology mapping tool, CogZ, to translate ontology mappings into software model transformation rules. The tool uses these transformations to automatically convert domain instance data into data that conforms to a model describing a visualization. After this transformation, a visualization of the domain instance data is generated.

Supporting end users in analyzing multiple data sources

The analysis of data from multiple sources promises rich insights into complex phenomena. However, such an analysis requires data integration, which remains difficult for users without programming skills. In order to enable those users to perform ad-hoc data analysis of multiple data sources, we are researching their cognitive support needs and developing tools that provide appropriate cognitive support for this task. As part of this, we are exploring a widget-centric data integration and analysis approach.

Smart media: bridging interactions and services for the smart internet

This chapter describes a need for Smart Media to enhance the vision of the Smart Internet. Smart Media is introduced as a mechanism to bridge Smart Services and Smart Interactions. Smart Media extends the existing notions of Media in HCI such as Hypermedia, New Media, Adaptive Hypermedia, and Social Media. There are three main contributions from this paper: (1) A historical perspective of media in HCI and how media could benefit from smartness; (2) through some high level sample scenarios, a proposal for Smart Media to meet the vision of the Smart Internet; and (3) a detailed example of how Smart Media could play a role in software development. The paper concludes by outlining some of the key challenges that need to be faced in realizing and applying Smart Media objects.

User interfaces for visual analysis and monitoring in business intelligence

Business intelligence is concerned with understanding and leveraging the vast amounts of information stored in the databases of modern enterprises. Visualization techniques have been used to make sense of this data for a long time, first in the form of simple charts, and nowadays in the form of interactive visualizations. By leveraging the strengths of the human perceptual system and incorporating user interaction, they support the flexible analysis of data as well as data monitoring by users. The recent progress in the fields of information and data visualization as well as new hardware developments and trends in business intelligence have led to several new challenges, which will be discussed in this workshop.