Visual Analytics of Vessel Movement

Visual analytics techniques support the process of data analysis, reasoning, and knowledge building performed by a human analyst. The techniques combine interactive, human-controllable visual displays with interactive operations for data querying and filtering, data transformations, calculation of derived data, and application of computational techniques for analysis and modelling. We demonstrate the use of visual analytics techniques and procedures for analyzing Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. We begin with showing how visual analytics approaches can help in exploring properties of the data, detecting problems, and finding ways to clean and improve the data. Then we describe two analysis scenarios focusing on the events of vessel stopping and on the vessel traffic through the strait between the bay of Brest, France, and the outer sea. Thereby we show how different techniques are applied and combined.