Balancing Interactive Data Management of Massive Data with Situational Awareness through Smart Aggregation

Designing a visualization system capable of processing, managing, and presenting massive data sets while maximizing the user´s situational awareness (SA) is a challenging, but important, research question in visual analytics. Traditional data management and interactive retrieval approaches have often focused on solving the data overload problem at the expense of the user´s SA. This paper discusses various data management strategies and the strengths and limitations of each approach in providing the user with SA. A new data management strategy, coined Smart Aggregation, is presented as a powerful approach to overcome the challenges of both massive data sets and maintaining SA. By combining automatic data aggregation with user-defined controls on what, how, and when data should be aggregated, we present a visualization system that can handle massive amounts of data while affording the user with the best possible SA. This approach ensures that a system is always usable in terms of both system resources and human perceptual resources. We have implemented our Smart Aggregation approach in a visual analytics system called VIAssist (Visual Assistant for Information Assurance Analysis) to facilitate exploration, discovery, and SA in the domain of Information Assurance.