Data exploration across temporal contexts

The ability to quickly explore and compare multiple scenarios is an important component of exploratory data analysis. Yet today’s interfaces cannot represent alternative exploration paths as a branching history, forcing the user to recognize conceptual branch points in a linear history. Further, the interface can only show information from one state at a time, forcing the user to use her memory to compare scenarios. Our system includes a tree-structured visualization for navigating across time and scenarios. The visualization also allows browsing the history and selectively undoing/redoing events within a scenario or across scenarios. It uses the AI formalism of contexts to maintain multiple, possibly mutually inconsistent, knowledge base states. Cross-context formulas can be written for explicit scenario comparison, including visualizations of scenario differences.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Mark Derthick, Steven F. Roth
• Keywords: IUI 2000, Multiple Scenarios, Represent Alternative Exploration, Scenario, Software Engineering