Visualization of the Provenance of Quantified Self Data

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) is currently doing research in the field of data provenance. One specific subject of interest is the visualization of the provenance of Quantified-Self data in an easy-to-understand, self-explaining way, with the goal to communicate it to end users of Quantified-Self applications. A review of existing works on provenance visualization showed that currently available visualizations are more suitable for expert audiences than for non-expert end users. However, the review also brought forth the idea to depict provenance in a comic-style manner: Prov Comics. A large part of this work is devoted to the development of a visualization concept that determines a mapping of provenance data onto graphics, thus providing General guidelines for the comics. A prototypical implementation was built as proof of concept, demonstrating the automatic generation of comics from provenance documents stored at the ProvStore website. Results from a small qualitative study suggest that a non-expert audience is generally able to understand the provenance of Quantified-Self data through Prov Comics without any prior instruction or training.