Spectrum: A visual analytics tool to explore movement logs

Chris North

Abstract

We present a visual analytics tool, called Spectrum, to analyze the movement and communication log data from VAST Challenge 2015. Spectrum has two views: MoveView and SpectrumView. MoveView gives an overview of the movement logs at a certain timestamp by synthesizing time, location and identity information. It replays movement logs over time and demonstrates communication logs with dynamic links. SpectrumView shows the status of all visitors' activities within a period of time. Each stay of visitors in a location is visualized as a line segment. The duration and location type of the stay are encoded by the length and color of the segment. Accumulating segments of the same visitor horizontally and aligning sequences of segments from different visitors form a general view of all visitors' activities. In our attempt to solve the VAST Challenge 2015, we find that Spectrum provides an intuitive overview of the log data and helps to discover movement patterns from a large number of log records.