Enhancing Visual Analysis by Linking Multiple Views of Data

Understanding your data is rarely as simple as knowing a single number. You often need to answer multiple questions at once, and at the same time see trends and context. Whatever your data, it can be difficult to find the real story while focusing on a single answer at a time.

Linking multiple views can help you make sense of data. The concept of brushing and linking is to tie together different views while you explore your data interactively. Seeing related data in multiple views can help us understand issues in a more complete way.

Highlighting and filtering related data in dashboards allows the analyst to answer questions such as:

• What else was happening at that time?
• What else is happening with that type or that one?
• And what’s the next level of detail?

In this paper we’ll discuss several ways to link perspectives. These include highlighting by entity, highlighting by date & time, highlighting by category, highlighting to show detail, and visual filtering.