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Linked Data Visualizations Across Multiple Files
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Settle on best way to communicate data linking #15

Closed ChrisBeaumont closed 12 years ago

ChrisBeaumont commented 12 years ago

How should selections be applied across data? Automatically? Manually as done now? Should their be a visual indication of which data sets are linked? Should the visual properties of linked data sets sync up?

In other words, what is the most intuitive way to do cross-data linking?

astrofrog commented 12 years ago

Here's one option: what you've demonstrated in the current GUI is something I think of as a one-time copy/paste, because you are copying one subset and pasting onto another existing subset (which might be a different color), so I can understand there is no linking. However, one could also imagine having the (alternate) option to say 'create this subset in this other dataset and auto-link it' which would produce a subset with the same color that would automatically update in both directions. Or one could have the option to create a 'dynamically linked subset' which would pop up a window asking for the two datasets to create a linked dataset for. I guess what I mean is that 'copy & paste' to me indicates a one time operation, whereas 'linking' indicates dynamic updating, and it might be nice to have both.

Anyway, this is probably more a question for @borkin (using the @ notation for a user ensures that they are notified!)

ChrisBeaumont commented 12 years ago

Yes, this is a possibility as well. I guess the HCI question for @borkin to figure out is when to use which style (manual vs auto), and how to communicate when and over what subsets/datasets auto-linking is being applied.

My guess is that auto-linking may be more intuitive when the conversion is obvious and fast (so that feedback is instant and reaffirms what we expect). If you set up propagating links (subset 1 links to subset 2 links to subset 3, across 3 different data sets), I suspect the auto-propagation will be confusing.

Probably, we will want to try implementing a few options, and testing them out.

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Thomas Robitaille < reply@reply.github.com

wrote:

Here's one option: what you've demonstrated in the current GUI is something I think of as a one-time copy/paste, because you are copying one subset and pasting onto another existing subset (which might be a different color), so I can understand there is no linking. However, one could also imagine having the (alternate) option to say 'create this subset in this other dataset and auto-link it' which would produce a subset with the same color that would automatically update in both directions. Or one could have the option to create a 'dynamically linked subset' which would pop up a window asking for the two datasets to create a linked dataset for. I guess what I mean is that 'copy & paste' to me indicates a one time operation, whereas 'linking' indicates dynamic updating, and it might be nice to have both.

Anyway, this is probably more a question for @borkin (using the @ notation for a user ensures that they are notified!)

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/astrofrog/cloudviz/issues/15#issuecomment-5885662

Chris Beaumont Graduate Student Institute for Astronomy University of Hawaii at Manoa 2680 Woodlawn Drive Honolulu, HI 96822 www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~beaumont

ChrisBeaumont commented 12 years ago

The LiveLink object should keep subset collections auto-synced. There's no hook into the GUI for this yet, as I would like to get input from @borkin on how to visually encode this