UVAM: The Unified Visual Analytics Model. The Unified Visualization Model Revisited.

Nowadays, the explosive growth of data generated from numerous sources results in ever-increasing volumes of data that are, therefore, difficult to understand, explore and analyze in order to extract information from them. The contribution of visualization to the exploration and understanding of these large datasets is very significant. Various application domains often require different visual representations, although several share the same intermediate steps, transformations, and/or manipulations of such data. These shared aspects lead to the requirement for a consistent and extensible visual analytics model across all application domains. In this context, we introduce the Unified Visual Analytics Model (UVAM), which combines the Unified Visualization Model (UVM) with the specific features of visual analytics. The UVAM is a state model represented as a flow between the many states that the data passes through throughout the process. It includes the user interactions with the data and its intermediate representations and how the user controls the transformations and, subsequently, modifications of the visualizations. This paper illustrates how the model includes various visual analytics processes and describes in detail a UVAM case study.