Towards a Visual Approach for Representing Analytical Provenance in Exploration Processes

Visualization techniques are useful tools to explore data by enabling the discovery of meaningful patterns and causal relationships. The discovery process is often exploratory and requires multiple views to support analyzing different or complementary perspectives to the data. In this context, analytic provenance shows great potential to understand users’ reasoning process through the study of their interactions on multiple view systems. In this paper, we present an approach based on the concept of chained views to support the incremental exploration of large, multidimensional datasets. Our goal is to provide visual representation of provenance information to enable users to retrace their analytical actions and to discover alternative exploratory paths without loosing information on previous analyses. We demonstrate that our implementation of the approach, MGExplorer (Multidimensional Graph Explorer), allows users to explore different perspectives to a dataset by modifying the input graph topology, choosing visualization techniques, arranging the visualization space in meaningful ways to the ongoing analysis and retracing their analytical actions. MGExplorer combines multiple visualization techniques and visual querying while representing provenance information as segments connecting views, which each supports selection operations that help define subsets of the current dataset to be explored by a different view. We demonstrate the usage of the tool through a study case where we explore co-authorship data. We assess the approach through performance metrics, temporal ordering of tasks, number of physical actions, and amount of information to be recalled inbetween actions applied to the chosen visual exploration scenarios using chained views.