UniVA: A Unified Interface for Visual Analytics

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It is difficult to develop general Visual Analytics (VA) solutions that can be applied in every possible use case, since a broad functionality for visualization, interaction, and computational analysis needs to be integrated. Hence, the idea of this project is to combine and coordinate existing tools, rather than developing a new "super-application". For this purpose, we will provide a unified user interface that allows access to data and functions of all tools to be used within a given workflow. We will address this objective on the two levels on which VA operates: on the data level to facilitate the exchange of data between different tools, and in the view level to arrange the visual output generated by different tools.The existing research in this area shows that many of the research questions relevant for our project have not yet been answered and that they have mainly been looked at in isolation. Yet, for us, the interlinked perspective is paramount for next-generation VA. In other fields, such as manufacturing, integrated solutions are already starting to appear. For example, we have developed Plant@Hand, a framework that links various applications and data sources on top of a CAD drawing for seamless access. We envision a similar solution for VA applications. For this purpose, we will develop general mechanisms for realizing such a unified user interface (UI), create a prototype, and test it with different use cases. The prototype will enhance Plant@Hand by integrating VA workflows. Coupling manufacturing and sophisticated visual data analysis within one and the same interface is a groundbreaking novel feature.