VisAnalyticsKit: User Logging for Mobile Visualization Applications

Abstract

This paper introduces a full-stack self-hosted user logging system for mobile devices, available to the open-source community. It excels through minimal integration and administration efforts for developers or researchers who use our system. VisAnalyticsKit features a W3C conform provenance data model and two-way data replication, rarely found among other analytics services. It facilitates pushing data from mobile devices to back-end servers and pulling data from data centers to the users’ or analysts’ devices. This allows replaying and reviewing previously captured log sessions in the sense of What You See Now, Is What I Saw Then (WYSNIWIST). Further, we evaluate our system by instrumenting a mobile visualization application, publicly available on the App Store.