Web transactions are multidimensional and have a number of attributes: client, URL, response times, and numbers of messages. One of the key questions is how to simultaneously lay out in a graph the multiple relationships, such as the relationships between the web client response times and URLs in a web access application. In this paper, we describe a freeze technique to enhance a physics-based visualization system for web transactions. The idea is to freeze one set of objects before laying out the next set of objects during the construction of the graph. As a result, we substantially reduce the force computation time. This technique consists of three steps: automated classification, a freeze operation, and a graph layout. These three steps are iterated until the final graph is generated. This iterated-freeze technique has been prototyped in several e-service applications at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. It has been used to visually analyze large volumes of service and sales transactions at online web sites.

Date Published: 9 June 2003
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 5009, Visualization and Data Analysis 2003, (9 June 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.474031

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5009:
Visualization and Data Analysis 2003
Robert F. Erbacher; Philip C. Chen; Jonathan C. Roberts; Matti T. Groehn; Katy Boerner, Editor(s)