Mirroring Sankey Diagrams for Visual Comparison Tasks.

Complex data sets require suitable information visualizations. With the rapidly increasing amount and complexity of data, the need for suitable interaction techniques to perform various data analyzing tasks is also growing. Flow diagrams are a powerful tool to understand the structure in hierarchical data sets. In many application scenarios, there is a need to quickly understand all facets in the data and compare different versions to make executive decisions. In order to illustrate our concepts, we selected Product Lifecycle Costing as application domain in which comparison tasks play an important role. On the one hand, an effective comparison of different versions needs to be visually presented to the user. On the other hand, different dimensions of the components need to be considered. We propose a mirroring method with the appropriate interaction techniques based on Sankey diagrams that address both issues.