Enhanced Interactive Spiral Display
Visualizing Temporal Data Using Two-Tone Pseudo Coloring on a Spiral
Christian Tominski (with Steffen Hadlak)University of Rostock, 2008-2024
About
Spiral displays have been developed to visualize the cyclic character of a data set. They can be useful for spotting seasonal patterns in time series data. This spiral display applies the expressive two-tone pseudo coloring by Saito et al. (2005), which allows users to read data values more precisely. Efficient interaction facilities allow for easy exploration of the data space and easy adjustment of a variety of visualization parameters.Publications
- C. Tominski and H. Schumann. Enhanced Interactive Spiral Display. Proceedings of the Annual SIGRAD Conference, Special Theme: Interactivity, Stockholm, Sweden, Linköping University Electronic Press, 2008.
Gallery



Download
You may try out this Java software. Download the file TTS.zip and if you are lucky you can (still) run it out of the box by calling java -jar TTS.jar on the command line. On high-resolution displays, you may want to insert -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0 right before the -jar switch with a scaling factor that matches your device configuration (e.g., 2.0 for 200% display scaling). This research prototype is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind.Controls
- Mouse hover: Highlight and label a segment
- Left mouse button drag: zoom into a region of interest
- Right mouse button: exit zoom mode
- Sprial scrolling: when scroll arrows are visible, you can press [LEFT] key or [RIGHT] key or click the arrows to change the current view
- Mouse wheel, [PAGE UP] key, [PAGE DOWN] key: scroll current view by one cycle (i.e., by the number of segments per cycle)
Data Requirements
- The first line in a data file must contain unique attribute names separated by semicolon
- The second line contains the data types of the attributes also separated by semicolon
- Valid data types are "Real", "Integer", and "Date"
- The rest of the lines contains the actual data
- Note that a temporal reference is only recognized if "Date" is the first attribute in the file
- Further note that the tool is not very cooperative with respect to duplicate attribute identifiers, missing values, or too many separators, so be careful when preparing your data
- Example:
Date;AvgTemp;Precipitation;RelHumidity Date;Real;Real;Integer 1893-01-01;-10.6;0;79 1893-01-02;-12.9;0.1;97 1893-01-03;-12;3.2;85 ...