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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1623–1626Cite as

Linking and Brushing

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Synonyms

Linked brushing; Linked views

Definition

Within the context of visual data exploration, Linking refers to the process in which user interactions in one display of a multi-display system are applied to some or all other displays. In this same context, brushing consists of the interactive selection of a subset of the displayed data by either dragging the mouse over the data of interest or using a bounding shape to isolate this subset. Together, linked brushing is one of the most powerful interactive tools for doing exploratory data analysis using visualization.

Historical Background

Perhaps the earliest reference to linked brushing was by McDonald [10] as a mechanism for cross-referencing between multiple plots. The term brushing was introduced in 1978 by Newton [11], who defined it as an interactive method for painting a group of points with a square, circular, or polygonal brush. Since then, researchers have expanded on these concepts, as described in the next section.

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Recommended Reading

  1. Becker R.A. and Cleveland W.S. Brushing scatterplots. Technometrics, 29(2):127–142, 1987.

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  2. Becker R.A., Cleveland W.S., and Wilks A.R. The use of brushing and rotation for data analysis. In Dynamic Graphics for Statistics, W.S. Cleveland, M.E. McGill (eds.). Wadsworth, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, 1988, pp. 1–50.

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  3. Chen H. Compound brushing. In Proc. IEEE Symp. Information Visualization, 2003, pp. 181–188.

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  4. Cook D. and Swayne D.F. Interactive and Dynamic Graphics for Data Analysis with R and GGobi. Springer, New York, 2008.

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  5. Doleisch H. and Hauser H. Smooth brushing for focus+context visualization of simulation data in 3D. J. WSCG, 10(1):147–155, 2002.

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  6. Fua Y.-H., Ward M.O., and Rundensteiner E.A. Structure-based brushes: a mechanism for navigating hierarchically organized data and information spaces. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., 6(2):150–159, 2000.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hauser H., Ledermann F., and Doleisch H. Angular brushing of extended parallel coordinates. In Proc. Information Visualization, 2002, pp. 127–130.

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  8. Henze C. Feature detection in linked derived spaces. In Proc. Conf. Visualization, 1998, pp. 87–94.

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  9. Martin A.R. and Ward M.O. High dimensional brushing for interactive exploration of multivariate data. In Proc. IEEE Conf. Visualization ’95, 1995, pp. 271–278.

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  10. McDonald J.A. Orion I: interactive graphics for data analysis. Technical report, Stanford University, 1983.

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  11. Newton C. Graphica: from alpha to omega in data analysis. In Graphical Representation of Multivariate Data, P. Wang (ed.). Academic, New York, 1978, pp. 59–92.

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  12. Wills G.J. 524,288 ways to say “this is interesting.” In Proc. Information Visualization, 1996, pp. 54–60.

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  13. Xie Z., Ward M.O., Rundensteiner E.A., and Huang S. Integrating data and quality space interactions in exploratory visualizations. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Coordinated and Multiple Views in Exploratory Visualization, 2007, pp. 47–60.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA

    Matthew O. Ward

Authors
  1. Matthew O. Ward
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Ward, M.O. (2009). Linking and Brushing. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1129

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