Georg Fuchs

• Dr.-Ing.
• Head of Big Data Analytics & Intelligence at Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems

A graph is a mathematical model for representing a system of pairwise relationships between entities. The term “graph” or “graph data” is quite often used to refer, actually, to a system of relationships, which can be represented as a graph, rather than to the mathematical model itself. In line with this practice, the term “graph” is used in this c...

Data scientists usually aim at building computer models. Computeroriented modelling methods and software tools are developed in statistics, machine learning, data mining, and various specialised disciplines, such as spatial statistics, transportation research, and animal ecology. However, valid and useful computerbased models cannot be obtained by...

There are two major types of temporal data, events and time series of attribute values, and there are methods for transforming one of them into the other. For events, a general analysis task is to understand how they are distributed in time. For time series, as well as for events of diverse kinds, a general task is to understand how the attribute v...

Texts are created for humans, who are trained to read and understand them. Texts are poorly suited for machine processing; still, humans need computer help when it is necessary to gain an overall understanding of characteristics and contents of large volumes of text or to find specific information in these volumes. Computer support in text analysis...

We begin with a simple motivating example that shows how putting spatial data on a map and seeing spatial relationships can help an analyst to make important discoveries. We consider possible contents and forms of spatial data, the ways of specifying spatial locations, and how to use spatial references for joining different datasets. We discuss the...

There are different kinds of spatio-temporal phenomena, including events that occur at different locations, movements of discrete entities, changes of shapes and sizes of entities, changes of conditions at different places and overall situations across large areas. Spatio-temporal data may specify positions, times, and characteristics of spatial ev...

Visual analytics approaches combine interactive visualisations with the use of computational techniques for data processing and analysis. Combining visualisation and computation has two sides. One side is computational support to visual analysis: outcomes of computations are intended to provide input to human cognition; for this purpose, they are r...

An illustrated example of problem solving is meant to demonstrate how visual representations of data support human reasoning and deriving knowledge from data.We argue that human reasoning plays a crucial role in solving non-trivial problems. Even when the primary goal of data analysis is to create a predictive model to be executed by computers, thi...

Images and video recordings are commonly categorised as unstructured data, which means that they are not primarily suited for computer analysis. The contents of unstructured data cannot be adequately represented by numbers or symbols and require the power of human vision for extracting meaningful information. While images and video are well suited...

In this chapter, we discuss how visual analytics techniques can support you in investigating and understanding the properties of your data and in conducting common data processing tasks. We consider several examples of possible problems in data and how they may manifest in visual representations, discuss where and why data quality issues can appear...

We introduce the basic principles and rules of the visual representation of information. Any visualisation involves so-called visual variables, such as position along an axis, size, colour hue and lightness, and shape of a graphical element. The variables differ by their perceptual properties, and it is important to choose appropriate variables dep...

One very common challenge that every data scientists has to deal with is to make sense of data sets with many attributes, where “many” can sometimes be tens, sometimes hundreds, and even thousands. Whether your goal is to do exploratory analysis on the relationships between the attributes, or to build models of the underlying phenomena, working wit...

Analysis is always focused on a certain subject, which is a thing or phenomenon that needs to be understood and, possibly, modelled. The data science process involves analysis of three different subjects: data, real world phenomena portrayed in the data, and computer models derived from the data. A subject can be seen as a system composed of multip...

This chapter very briefly summarises the main ideas and principles of visual analytics, while the main goal is to show by example how to devise new visual analytics approaches and workflows using general techniques of visual analytics: abstraction, decomposition, selection, arrangement, and visual comparison.We take an example of an analysis scenar...

Visual analytics is a research discipline that is based on acknowledging the power and the necessity of the human vision, understanding, and reasoning in data analysis and problem solving. It develops a methodology of analysis that facilitates human activities by means of interactive visual representations of information. By examples from the domai...

This textbook presents the main principles of visual analytics and describes techniques and approaches that have proven their utility and can be readily reproduced. Special emphasis is placed on various instructive examples of analyses, in which the need for and the use of visualisations are explained in detail. The book begins by introducing the m...

As the number of moving objects increases, the challenges for achieving operational goals w.r.t. the mobility in many domains that are critical to economy and safety emerge dramatically. In domains such as air traffic management, this dictates a shift of operations’ paradigm from location based, as it is today, to trajectory based, where trajectori...

A possible objective in analyzing trajectories of multiple simultaneously moving objects, such as football players during a game, is to extract and understand the general patterns of coordinated movement in different classes of situations as they develop. For achieving this objective, we propose an approach that includes a combination of query tech...

We present a big data framework for the prediction of streaming trajectory data, enriched from other data sources and exploiting mined patterns of trajectories, allowing accurate long-term predictions with low latency. To meet this goal, we follow a multi-step methodology. First, we efficiently compress surveillance data in an online fashion, by co...

In air traffic management and control, movement data describing actual and planned flights are used for planning, monitoring and post-operation analysis purposes with the goal of increased efficient utilization of air space capacities (in terms of delay reduction or flight efficiency), without compromising the safety of passengers and cargo, nor ti...

The research presented in this paper aims to show the deployment and use of advanced technologies towards processing surveillance data for the detection of events, contributing to maritime situation awareness via trajectories’ detection, synopses generation and semantic enrichment of trajectories. We first introduce the context of the maritime doma...

To complement the currently existing definitions and conceptual frameworks of visual analytics, which focus mainly on activities performed by analysts and types of techniques they use, we attempt to define the expected results of these activities. We argue that the main goal of doing visual analytics is to build a mental and/or formal model of a ce...

Modern movement tracking technologies enable acquisition of high quality data about movements of the players and the ball in the course of a football match. However, there is a big difference between the raw data and the insights into team behaviors that analysts would like to gain. To enable such insights, it is necessary first to establish relati...

Motivated by real-life emerging needs in critical domains, this paper proposes a coherent and generic ontology for the representation of semantic trajectories, in association to related events and contextual information, to support analytics. The main contribution of the proposed ontology is twofold: (a) The representation of semantic trajectories...

Clustering of trajectories of moving objects by similarity is an important technique in movement analysis. Existing distance functions assess the similarity between trajectories based on properties of the trajectory points or segments. The properties may include the spatial positions, times, and thematic attributes. There may be a need to focus the...

Numeric time series is a class of data consisting of chronologically ordered observations represented by numeric values. Much of the data in various domains, such as financial, medical and scientific, are represented in the form of time series. To cope with the increasing sizes of datasets, numerous approaches for abstracting large temporal data ar...

Uncertainty about possible train delays has an impact on train trips, as the exact arrival time is unknown during trip planning. Delays can lead to missing a connecting train at the transfer station, or to coming too late to an appointment at the destination. Facing this uncertainty, the traveler may wish to use an earlier train or a different conn...

This paper is concerned with the representation and exploration of flows, defined as spatial interactions between geographic locations. Flows are challenging to display in a comprehensible manner due to the nature of the data, which are characterized by many crossings and overlaps leading to clutter. A number of different strategies have been sugge...

We introduce the concept of time mask, which is a type of temporal filter suitable for selection of multiple disjoint time intervals in which some query conditions fulfill. Such a filter can be applied to time-referenced objects, such as events and trajectories, for selecting those objects or segments of trajectories that fit in one of the selected...

Origin-destination (OD) movement data describe moves or trips between spatial locations by specifying the origins, destinations, start, and end times, but not the routes travelled. For studying the spatio-temporal patterns and trends of mass mobility, individual OD moves of many people are aggregated into flows (collective moves) by time intervals....

To enable decision makers to conduct a rapid assessment of the situation during the disaster response phase and improve situational awareness, we propose an approach to identify affected areas using geo-spatial footprints. These geo-spatial footprintssummarize information and threats and are derived from georeferenced social media messages and auth...

Understanding of data quality is essential for choosing suitable analysis methods and interpreting their results. Investigation of quality of movement data, due to their spatio-temporal nature, requires consideration from multiple perspectives at different scales. We review the key properties of movement data and, on their basis, create a typology...

People using mobile devices for making phone calls, accessing the internet, or posting georeferenced contents in social media create episodic digital traces of their presence in various places. Availability of personal traces over a long time period makes it possible to detect repeatedly visited places and identify them as home, work, place of soci...

We demonstrate a system of tools for real-time detection of significant clusters of spatial events and observing their evolution. The tools include an incremental stream clustering algorithm, interactive techniques for controlling its operation, a dynamic map display showing the current situation, and displays for investigating the cluster evolutio...

The environmental and noise impact of airports often causes extensive political discussion which in some cases even lead to transnational tensions. Analyzing local approach and departure patterns around an airport is difficult since it depends on a variety of complex variables like weather, local and general regulations and many more. Yet, understa...

Annually organized VAST Challenges provide a unique opportunity to analyze complex data with available ground truth. In 2014, one of the tasks was to interpret routine and anomalous patterns of human mobility based on big data: trajectories of cars and credit card transactions. We describe a scalable visual analytics approach to solving this proble...

Mobility diaries of a large number of people are needed for assessing transportation infrastructure and spatial development planning. Acquisition of personal mobility diaries through population surveys is a costly and error-prone endeavour. We examine an alternative approach to obtaining similar information from episodic digital traces of people’s...

Analysis of human mobility is currently a hot research topic in data mining, geographic information science and visual analytics. While a wide variety of methods and tools are available, it is still hard to find recommendations for considering a data set systematically from multiple perspectives. To fill this gap, we demonstrate a workflow of a com...

We present a work in progress on developing a tool supporting real-time detection of significant clusters of spatial events and observing their evolution. The tool consists of an incremental stream clustering algorithm and coordinated map and timeline displays showing current situation and cluster evolution.

Repeatedly visited personal and public places were extracted from trajectories by finding spatial clusters of stop points. Temporal patterns of people's presence in the places resulted from spatio-temporal aggregation of the data by the places and hourly intervals within the weekly cycle. Based on these patterns, we identified the meanings or purpo...

Social networking services have become a major channel for the digital society to share content, opinions, experiences on activities or events, as well as on products, services and brands. Evaluating digital feedback on the latter can be a valuable asset for companies seeking product and consumer insights. However, the analysis of short, noisy, fra...

Due to the spread of mobile handheld devices, new application fields like technical maintenance and mechanical inspections open up to their use. Yet, to fully benefit from their modern technical capabilities, standard interaction techniques need to be revised and new ways of accessing the abundance of technical documentation on the handheld need to...

Social microblogging services such as Twitter result in massive streams of georeferenced messages and geolocated status updates. This real-time source of information is invaluable for many application areas, in particular for disaster detection and response scenarios. Consequently, a considerable number of works has dealt with issues of their acqui...

Data reflecting movements of people, such as GPS or GSM tracks, can be a source of information about mobility behaviors and activities of people. Such information is required for various kinds of spatial planning in the public and business sectors. Movement data by themselves are semantically poor. Meaningful information can be derived by means of...

An exploratory study of the potential of georeferenced Twitter data (using tweets from Seattle-area residents over a two-month period) extracts knowledge about people's everyday life.

Vector graphics can be scaled without loss of quality, making them suitable for mobile image communication where a given graphics must be typically represented in high quality for a wide range of screen resolutions. One problem is that file size increases rapidly as content becomes more detailed, which can reduce response times and efficiency in mo...

Smart environments are beginning to have a large impact to collaborative group work in business and science. The multi-user and multi-display character of these group work environments presents a novel challenge for information visualization, namely, the adaptation of graphical representations of data to specific target devices in the environment....

Today’s fast growth of both the number and complexity of digital 3D models results in a number of research challenges. Amongst others, the efficient presentation of, and interaction with, such complex models is essential. It therefore has become more and more important to provide the user with a smart visual interface that presents all the informat...

This publication introduces a new approach for adding semantic information to digital imagery. To achieve this, meta-data is directly fused with the content of the associated image region by applying data hiding techniques. This overcomes different existing problems and the thereby imposed drawbacks of a loose coupling between content and meta-data...

Focus + context techniques are widely used for the efficient visualization of large data sets. However, the corresponding adaptation of the representation to the task at hand is not trivial, requiring a suitable model of the visualization goal. One type of focus + context technique is the use of lenses, interactive tools that modify the visualizati...

Color coding is a widely used visualization method for scalar data. To generate expressive and effective visual representations, it is extremely important to carefully design the mapping from data to color. In this paper, we describe a color coding approach that accounts for the different tasks users might pursue when analyzing data. Our task descr...

In many application domains there is a strong need to produce content both for traditional print media and for interactive media. In order to fully benefit from digital devices, online documents must provide mechanisms to support interactivity and for the personalization of content. Thus, powerful authoring tools as well as flexible layout techniqu...

Mobile and ubiquitous systems require task models for addressing the challenges of adaptivity and situation-aware assistance. Today, both challenges are seen as separate issues in system development, addressed by different modeling concepts. We propose an approach for a unified modeling concept that uses annotated hierarchical task trees for synthe...

Textual annotations are important elements in all but the most simple visual interfaces. In order to integrate textual annotations smoothly into the dynamic graphical content of interactive information systems, fast yet high-quality label layout algorithms are required. With the ongoing pervasion of mobile applications these requirements are shifte...

Maintaining and repairing complex technical facilities such as generating plants requires comprehensive knowledge on subsystems, operational and safety procedures by the technician. Upgrades to the facility may mean that knowledge about these becomes outdated, raising the need for documentation at the working site. Today's commonplace availability...

For the visualization of abstract information with spatial dependencies, the combination of icon representations with maps is widely accepted. However, with an increasing amount of data creating complete, yet not overloaded, visualizations becomes evermore difficult. Effective interaction methods are therefore needed to discover hidden information...

Advanced user interfaces are a crucial factor in the success of mobile information systems employed by different users on a variety of devices. They should provide state-of-the-art visualization and interaction techniques taylored for specific tasks, while at the same time allow flexible deployment of these components on a multitude of (mobile) har...

The effective visual exploration of large and complexly structured, abstract data requires sophisticated and interactive visualization techniques. Development of these techniques is the major discipline in information visualization. On the other hand, visualization of geospatial data is an important topic in cartography. The necessity to combine ex...

The combination of map displays with icon techniques is well-suited for visualizing geo-spatial dependent multivariate data. The requirements for icon placement on the map, although not trivial, are not properly attended by most interactive visualization systems. In cartography, a number of methods for automatic text label placement and map general...

Traditionally, the subject of cartography has been geographic data, while information visualization has dealt with abstract, non-spatial information. With the ever increasing amount of data harvested worldwide, more and more of this data includes both geographic and abstract information at the same time. Efficient visualization of this data calls f...

The size of today's typical data sets calls for visualizations that ab-stain from showing maximum detail, focusing instead on relevant information. One approach is to filter the data with lens techniques, i.e. spatially confined filters controlled interactively by the user. Lenses can also be 'stacked' to create complex filters. Usually, lenses are...

The use of techniques from the fields of visualization, natural language and task modeling provides a new complementary style of human computer interaction, where the computer becomes an intelligent, active and personalized collaborator. In this paper we present an adaptive, platform independent integration strategy of visualization, speech and tas...