Interactive Visual Exploration and Analysis

Interactive exploration and analysis of multi-field data utilizes a tight feedback loop of computation/visualization and user interaction to facilitate knowledge discovery in complex datasets. It does so by providing both overview visualizations, as well as support for focusing on features utilizing iterative drill-down operations. When exploring multi-field data, interactive exploration and analysis relies on a combination of the following concepts: (i) physical views that show information in the context of the spatiotemporal domain (domain perspective), (ii) range views show relationships between multiple fields (range perspective), and (iii) selecting/marking data subsets in one view (e.g., regions in a physical view) leading to a consistent highlighting of this subset in all other views (brushing and linking). Based on these principles, interactive exploration and analysis supports building complex feature definitions, e.g., using Boolean operations to combine multiple selections. Utilizing derived fields, statistical methods, etc., adds a further layer of flexibility to this approach. Using these concepts, it is also possible to integrate feature detection methods from the other chapters of this part, as well as applicationspecific feature extraction methods into an joint framework. This methodology of interactive visual data exploration and analysis has proven its potential in a larger number of successful applications. It has been implemented in a larger number of systems and is already available for a wide spectrum of different application domains.