Kanit Wongsuphasawat, General Examination

Abstract: Visual data analysis is an iterative process that involves both open-ended exploration and focused question answering. However, traditional visual analysis tools provide specification interfaces that are suitable only for question answering but are often tedious for exploration. This doctoral thesis investigates the design of visualization tools that augments traditional specification interfaces with automated chart specification to facilitate exploratory analysis. First, we present the design and controlled studies of Voyager, a system that couples faceted browsing with visualization recommendations to promote open-ended exploration. To facilitate both exploration and question answering, we present Voyager 2, a visual analysis tool that blends manual and automated specification in a unified system. To support specifications and recommendations in Voyager and Voyager 2, we also present the Vega-Lite visualization grammar and the CompassQL visualization query language, which defines an organized collection of charts. In current work, we plan to extend our interfaces and query engine to facilitate exploratory analysis of datasets with a larger number of fields.