Visualization Cube: Modeling Interaction for Exploratory Data Analysis of Spatiotemporal Trend Information

This paper proposes the visualization cube for modeling interaction in exploratory analysis of spatiotemporal trend information. Recent growth of the Web has brought us various type of information, among which trend information is one of the important information, because it is crucial for our decision making. Although interactive information visualization system is useful for supporting exploratory data analysis of trend information, the design of such systems tends to depend on the idea of each designer. It is expected that establishing adequate interaction model will contribute to the design of those systems. The visualization cube defines the abstract data structure of spatiotemporal trend information, which consists of 4 axes: spatial, temporal, statistics-value, and type-of-views axes. Interactions for generating views for analytic purpose are defined as the operations on it. Based on the interaction model, the prototype system is developed and used in actual classes of an elementary school, of which the result shows the system has enough usability for 5th-grade elementary school students to perform exploratory data analysis. It is expected the visualization cube contributes to the design of interactive information visualization systems.