Querying and Creating Visualizations by Analogy

Abstract

While there have been advances in visualization systems, particularly in multi-view visualizations and visual exploration, the process of building visualizations remains a major bottleneck in data exploration. We show that provenance metadata collected during the creation of pipelines can be reused to suggest similar content in related visualizations and guide semi-automated changes. We introduce the idea of query-by-example in the context of an ensemble of visualizations, and the use of analogies as first-class operations in a system to guide scalable interactions. We describe an implementation of these techniques in VisTrails, a publicly-available, open-source system.