Understanding constellations in large data collections has become a common task. One obstacle a user has to overcome is the internal complexity of these repositories. For example, extracting connected data from a normalized relational database requires knowledge of the table structure which might not be available for the casual user. In this paper we present a visualization framework which presents the collection as a set of entities and relations (on the data level). Using rating functions, we divide large relation networks into small graphs which resemble ego-centered networks. These graphs are connected so the user can browse from one to another. To further assist the user, we present two views which embed information on the evolution of the relations into the graphs. Each view emphasizes another aspect of temporal development. The framework can be adapted to any repository by a flexible data interface and a graph configuration file. We present some first web-based applications including a visualization of the DBLP data set. We use the DBLP visualization to evaluate our approach.
Not all approaches use the entity and relation abstraction. The ThemeRiver @cite_12 application shows how the frequency of a term in a set of documents changes over time. The results for multiple terms are presented as a plot where one axis shows the time and the other axis the frequency.
@cite_12
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We introduce the parallel coordinates matrix (PCM) as the counterpart to the scatterplot matrix (SPLOM). Using a graph-theoretic approach, we determine a list of axis orderings such that all pairwise relations can be displayed without redundancy while each parallel-coordinates plot can be used independently to visualize all variables of the dataset. Therefore, existing axis-ordering algorithms, rendering techniques, and interaction methods can easily be applied to the individual parallel-coordinates plots. We demonstrate the value of the PCM in two case studies and show how it can serve as an overview visualization for parallel coordinates. Finally, we apply existing focus-and-context techniques in an interactive setup to support a detailed analysis of multivariate data.