Simone Kriglstein

A visualization approach for difference analysis of process models and instance traffic

Organizations are often confronted with the task to identify differences and commonalities between process models but also between the instance traffic that presents how instances have progressed through the model. The use cases range from comparison of process variants in order to identify redundancies and inconsistencies between them to the analysis of instance traffic for the (re)design of models. Visualizations can support users in their analysis tasks, e.g., to see if and how the models and their instance traffic have changed. In this paper we present a visualization approach to highlight the differences and commonalities between two models and --- if available --- their instance traffic.

Visualization-based analysis of gameplay data – A review of literature ☆

Abstract As video games are becoming more and more complex and are reaching a broader audience, there is an increasing interest in procedures to analyze player behavior and the impact of design decisions. Game companies traditionally relied on user-testing methods, like playtesting, surveys or videotaping, to obtain player feedback. However, these qualitative methods for data collection are time-consuming and the obtained data is often incomplete or subjective. Therefore, instrumentation became popular in recent years to unobtrusively obtain the detailed data required to thoroughly evaluate player behavior. To make sense of the large amount of data, appropriate tools and visualizations have been developed. This article reviews literature on visualization-based analysis of game metric data in order to give an overview of the current state of this emerging field of research. We discuss issues related to gameplay analysis, propose a broad categorization of visualization techniques and discuss their characteristics. Furthermore, we point out open problems to promote future research in this area.

A spatiotemporal visualization approach for the analysis of gameplay data

Contemporary video games are highly complex systems with many interacting variables. To make sure that a game provides a satisfying experience, a meaningful analysis of gameplay data is crucial, particularly because the quality of a game directly relates to the experience a user gains from playing it. Automatic instrumentation techniques are increasingly used to record data during playtests. However, the evaluation of the data requires strong analytical skills and experience. The visualization of such gameplay data is essentially an information visualization problem, where a large number of variables have to be displayed in a comprehensible way in order to be able to make global judgments. This paper presents a visualization tool to assist the analytical process. It visualizes the game space as a set of nodes which players visit over the course of a game and is also suitable to observe time-dependent information, such as player distribution. Our tool is not tailored to a specific type of genre. To show the flexibility of our approach we use two different kinds of games as case studies.

A survey on user studies and technical aspects of mobile multimedia applications

Abstract Some years ago, Mobile TV has been introduced in several countries all over the world. It was expected that it would play a major role among traditional TV services. Unfortunately, the success has been limited at the beginning. Since Mobile TV brings new aspects into television, like small screens, consumption in noisy surroundings, etc., it also represents a new challenge on how to create, transfer and present content that maximizes the consumer experience. Today, some of these issues have been solved. Due to the introduction of smart phones and the large amount of available applications customers are starting to use their mobile phones for several purposes including mobile multimedia services. As a consequence, the concept for Mobile TV has changed significantly. In the past, research has often been focusing on one particular aspect of this new TV scheme, as well as surveys on this research often neglected aspects that still might be of interest when trying to understand the dependencies of Mobile TV content and presentation to perceived quality. In this survey paper we want to discuss challenges and requirements in a comprehensive way, trying to shed light on all relevant aspects of Mobile TV. The aim of this paper is to give a good overview about the state of the art with the focus of users’ need and experiences. A large collection of technical aspects and research results represents a special interest of this study. Finally, we want to discuss a framework for mobile multimedia applications which is relevant for further research work.

TimeCleanser: a visual analytics approach for data cleansing of time-oriented data

Poor data quality leads to unreliable results of any kind of data processing and has profound economic impact. Although there are tools to help users with the task of data cleansing, support for dealing with the specifics of time-oriented data is rather poor. However, the time dimension has very specific characteristics which introduce quality problems, that are different from other kinds of data. We present TimeCleanser, an interactive Visual Analytics system to support the task of data cleansing of time-oriented data. In order to help the user to deal with these special characteristics and quality problems, TimeCleanser combines semi-automatic quality checks, visualizations, and directly editable data tables. The evaluation of the TimeCleanser system within a focus group (two target users, one developer, and two Human Computer Interaction experts) shows that (a) our proposed method is suited to detect hidden quality problems of time-oriented data and (b) that it facilitates the complex task of data cleansing.

Technical Section: PLATO: A visual analytics system for gameplay data

During the last decade the game industry has evolved into a highly competitive market. This has prompted game developers to seek ways to increase the quality of their games which in turn is, to a large extent, dependent on the quality of the player experience. In addition to adapting qualitative evaluation methods, developers have therefore started to use instrumentation techniques to unobtrusively collect large amounts of data of player behavior over time. This creates the need for adequate analysis tools in order to explore and make sense of the data. In this paper we present PLATO, a visual analytics system for time-dependent and multidimensional gameplay data. Gameplay is formally represented as a graph which gives us the advantage of a general representation and makes the tool applicable to a wide variety of games. Moreover, doing so enables us to draw upon a large number of graph algorithms. PLATO integrates techniques for subgraph matching, pathfinding, data comparison, and clustering as well as several visualization techniques. We demonstrate the utility of our system by analyzing real world data from a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, a team-based first person shooter, a puzzle game, and a platformer.

Knoocks - A Visualization Approach for OWL Lite Ontologies

With increasing popularity of ontologies in various communities, visualizations of their content and structure became more and more important. In the past few years a number of visualization approaches were developed with the focus either on the representation of the relationships between classes or on the hierarchical structure and instances. However for several applications, a visualization which combines information about instances, classes and hierarchical as well as non-hierarchical relationships is from interest. In this paper we present Knoocks (Knowledge Blocks), which is a visualization approach with focus on both the interconnections within the ontology and the instances in conjunction with their hierarchical structure.

Knoocks: New Visualization Approach for Ontologies

Ontologies are becoming popular in various communities. They give users the possibilities to understand, exchange, analyze or share knowledge of a specific domain. However ontologies can be very large and complex and therefore visualizations should help the user to understand and manipulate ontologies easily. Most visualizations concentrate on the structure of ontologies. For users, instances are often more interesting, because they represent the real world objects. This paper presents Knoocks (knowledge blocks) as a visualization approach which focuses on instances related to their structure. An evaluation which compared Knoocks with Jambalaya and CropCircles showed its benefits in visualizing instances.

Pep Up Your Time Machine: Recommendations for the Design of Information Visualizations of Time-Dependent Data

Representing time-dependent data plays an important role in information visualization. Time presents specific challenges for the representation of data because time is a complex and highly abstract concept. Basically, there are two ways to support reasoning about time: time can be represented by space, and time can also be represented by time (animation). From the point of view of the users, both forms of representation have their strengths and weaknesses which we will illustrate in this chapter. In recent years, a large number of visualizations has been developed to solve the problem of representing time-dependent data. Nevertheless, it is still not clear which types of visualizations support the cognitive processes of the users. It is necessary to investigate the interactions of real users with visualizations to clarify this issue. The following chapter will give an overview of empirical evaluations and recommendations for the design of visualizations for time-dependent data.

Human Centered Design in Practice: A Case Study with the Ontology Visualization Tool Knoocks

Ontologies make it possible to understand, analyze, exchange or share knowledge of a specific domain and therefore they are becoming popular in various communities. However, ontologies can be very complex and therefore visualizations can support users to understand the ontology easier. Moreover, graphical representations make ontologies with their structure more manageable. For an effective visualization, it is necessary to consider the domain for which the ontology is developed and its users with their needs and expectations. This paper presents the development process of Knoocks (Knowledge Blocks) - a visualization tool for OWL Lite ontologies - which was implemented with the help of the human centered design process. The presented case study underlies the importance of repeated usability evaluations during the development process to identify weak points of the design and missing features which are relevant for the intended users.