Interactive visualization of big data

Abstract

Data becomes too big to see. Yet visualization is a central way people understand data. We need to learn new ways to accommodate data visualization that scales up and out for large data to enable people to explore visually their data interactively in real-time as a means to understanding it. The five V’s of big data—value, volume, variety, velocity, and veracity—each highlights the challenges of this endeavor. We present these challenges and a system, Skydive, that we are developing to meet them. Skydive presents an approach that tightly couples a database back-end with a visualization front-end for scaling up and out. We show how hierarchical aggregation can be used to drive this, and the powerful types of interactive visual presentations that can be supported. We are preparing for the day soon when visualization becomes the sixth V of big data.