Visual Analytics Presentation Tools Applied in HTML Documents

In this paper we present novel means to communicate and present gained knowledge using semi-guided interactive visualizations embedded in standard HTML documents. The goal of the work is to let the analyst (author) explore data and simultaneously save important discoveries and thus enable collaboration and sharing of gained insights over the Internet. The readers of the document will benefit from receiving an integrated and interactive document that can "coach" them in the understanding and testing of hypotheses leading to faster understanding and a higher confidence level in the presented visual information. The approach is based on the visual analytics (VA) toolkit (GAV), which also provides a mechanism that supports the storage of interactive events in an analytical reasoning process through "memorized interactive visualization views" or snapshots that can be saved at any time during an explorative data analysis process. In a typical scenario an application, comprised of GAV VA components, is embedded in the HTML document together with target data and the snapshots of discoveries. Any standard HTML event, such as the user clicking a textual link or an image can be used to instantiate a snapshot, creating a link between a descriptive text and an interactive visualization presentation. As the GAV application and corresponding data are integrated with the HTML code, residing on the client machine, hardware accelerated graphics can be used to provide interactive performance of demanding visualizations. We demonstrate the potential of the developed methods in the context of geoanalytics and molecular visualization scenarios.