BigVis 2018 - 2018 International Workshop on Big Data Visual Exploration and Analytics

One the major challenges of the Big Data era is that it has realized the availability of a great amount and variety of massive datasets for analysis by non-corporate data analysts, such as research scientists, data journalists, policy makers, SMEs and individuals. A major characteristic of these datasets is that they are: accessible in a raw format that are not being loaded or indexed in a database (e.g., plain text, json, rdf), dynamic, dirty and heterogeneous in nature. The level of difficulty in transforming a data-curious user into someone who can access and analyze that data is even more burdensome now for a great number of users with little or no support and expertise on the data processing part. The purpose of visual data exploration is to facilitate information perception and manipulation, knowledge extraction and inference by non-expert users. The visualization techniques, used in a variety of modern systems, provide users with intuitive means to interactively explore the content of the data, identify interesting patterns, infer correlations and causalities, and supports sense-making activities that are not always possible with traditional data analysis techniques.
In the Big Data era, several challenges arise in the field of data visualization and analytics. First, the modern exploration and visualization systems should offer scalable data management techniques in order to efficiently handle billion objects datasets, limiting the system response in a few milliseconds. Besides, nowadays systems must address the challenge of on-the-fly scalable visualizations over large and dynamic sets of volatile raw data, offering efficient interactive exploration techniques, as well as mechanisms for information abstraction, sampling and summarization for addressing problems related to visual information overplotting. Further, they must encourage user comprehension offering customization capabilities to different user-defined exploration scenarios and preferences according to the analysis needs. Overall, the challenge is to enable users to gain value and insights out of the data as rapidly as possible, minimizing the role of IT-expert in the loop.
The BigVis workshop aims at addressing the above challenges and issues by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss exchange and disseminate their work. BigVis attempts to attract attention from the research areas of Data Management & Mining, Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction and highlight novel works that bridge together these communities.