VIMTEX: A Visualization Interface for Multivariate, Time-Varying, Geological Data Exploration

Abstract

Observing interactions among chemical species and microorganisms in the earth's sub-surface is a common task in the field of geology. Bioremediation experiments constitute one such class of interactions which focus on getting rid of pollutants through processes such as carbon sequestration. The main goal of scientists' observations is to analyze the dynamics of the chemical reactions and understand how they collectively affect the carbon content of the soil. In our work, we extract the high-level goals of geologists and propose a visual analytics solution which helps scientists in deriving insights about multivariate, temporal behavior of these chemical species. Specifically, our key contributions are the following: i) characterization of the domain-specific goals and their translation to exploratory data analysis tasks, ii) developing an analytical abstraction in the form of perceptually motivated screen-space metrics for bridging the gap between the tasks and the visualization, and iii) realization of the tasks and metrics in the form of VIMTEX, which is a set of coordinated multiple views for letting scientists observe multivariate, temporal relationships in the data. We provide several examples and case studies along with expert feedback for demonstrating the efficacy of our solution.