Linking and Brushing

Linking and brushing

The idea of linking and brushing is to combine different visualization methods to overcome the shortcomings of single techniques. Interactive changes made in one visualization are automatically reflected in the other visualizations. Note that connecting multiple visualizations through interactive linking and brushing provides more information than considering the component visualizations independently.

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Linking and brushing

Brushing means interactively selecting a subset of the data items with an input device. This is usually done to highlight this subset, to delete it from the view or to de-emphasize it, if the user wants to focus on the other items.

Brushing is most useful in connection with linking. For instance when working on a scatterplot matrix, the user could brush some points in one plot. This causes the brushing–effect to be applied to the corresponding points in other plots.

References

• [Keim, 2004]: D. A. Keim, Information Visualization and Visual Data Mining, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and computer graphics, 2002.
• [Voigt, 2004]: R. Voigt, Linking and brushing, 2004.