Interactive visualization of serial periodic data

Serial periodic data exhibit both serial and periodic properties. For example, time continues forward serially, but weeks, months, and years are periods that recur. While there are extensive visualization techniques for exploring serial data, and a few for exploring periodic data, no existing technique simultaneously displays serial and periodic attributes of a data set. We introduce a spiral visualization technique, which displays data along a spiral to highlight serial attributes along the spiral axis and periodic ones along the radii. We show several applications of the spiral visualization to data exploration tasks, present our implementation, discuss the capacity for data analysis, and present findings of our informal study with users in data-rich scientific domains.