Analysing associations of textual and relational data with a multiple views system

Visualization interfaces that offer multiple coordinated views on a particular set of data items are useful for navigating and exploring complex information spaces. In application areas like customer relationship management (CRM) or business intelligence (BI), for example, structured customer or company data is often associated to text-based information like telemarketing transcripts or trade press articles. Supporting the analysis of such text information and related structured data is a major challenge for current CRM and BI tools. In this paper, we present a system for visually analyzing these particular information spaces based on a multiple views paradigm. The system brings together views on text similarity, text categories, and associated relational attributes; visual overlay techniques help to keep track of navigation and selection operations in complementary views. The paper sketches an application example and summarizes results from an initial usability evaluation.