Guidance-Enriched Visual Analytics for Temporal Data (GuidedVA)

This proposal will break new ground in Visual Analytics (VA) by incorporating guidance to support users in their exploration and decision-making processes as well as in making continuous progress. Although guidelines apply in the development phase of VA, the guidance aims to support the user while working with VA. In doing so, we anticipate a thorough impact on decision making in a multitude of disciplines. Many of the political, societal, and economic decisions which affect all our lives are based on charts evolving over time and built by subject matter experts. However, the process of analyzing and visualizing massive amounts of data is complex and error-prone, especially when it comes to temporal data including uncertainty. Although VA has helped providing advanced methods and tools in the recent years, the gap between the expertise required to use them and the proliferation of well-grounded VA for decision making is widening. More guidance to come up with reliable data analyses, visualization, and interpretations is clearly required, but this is largely uncharted territory in VA research. The recent work of the applicant's team and the progress in VA have demonstrated that it is crucial to integrate guidance into VA methods in order to provide effective and appropriate VA solutions. GuidedVA will build on these initial attempts and will allow us to develop a conceptual framework for guidance-enriched VA as the foundation for a completely new class of VA solutions.