The EventViewer: A tool for visualizing and exploring events extracted from Ocean Observing System data

This paper presents capabilities of the EventViewer, a graphical user interface for visualizing and exploring patterns in events. The EventViewer supports queries on events stored in an events database and exploration of various temporal and spatial patterns in events. Interactions in the EventViewer interface allow users to select events from the database, assign spatial, temporal and thematic categories to graphic display elements called bands, stacks, and panels which causes events to be displayed according to their associations with the user selected categories. The spatial, temporal and thematic categories can be rearranged among the bands, stacks and panels thus changing the view of events and causing different patterns to become apparent. The EventViewer support exploration of periodic patterns, spatial and temporal trends, and event-event relationships. The EventViewer functionality is illustrated with oceanographic events extracted from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing system sensor data. Events are extracted from multiple time series variables collected at a number of locations and depths in the Gulf of Maine.