TAVO: A Tree-like Analytical View for OLAP

Online Analytical Processing provides multidimensional, summarized views of business data. It enables users to drill down or roll up from a level to another level in a dimension, which forms an analytical path/thread. In many scenarios, this analytical path is very useful for users to keep their analysis in context. But most visualization tools display only the result in one chart after drilling down or rolling up. The analytical context or the intermediate process is lost or indirect. This paper presents a novel OLAP visualization approach called TAVO - a Tree-like Analysis View for OLAP. It visualizes the multi-dimensional data by various charts and organizes them in a tree, where each node is a chart and connects other charts when a user navigates along a dimension by levels or to another dimension. By this way, the drill-down/roll-up semantic relationship is clearly expressed. Users can easily explore relative history queries by rolling up in a chart. We implemented TAVO by dynamically generating multidimensional expressions (MDX) on the fly and then visualizing the results by visualization components such as Microsoft Office Web Component. The system prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of TAVO.