Time series compression for adaptive chart generation
Giuseppe Burtini, Scott Fazackerley, Ramon Lawrence · 2013
Web content is consumed on smart phones, tablets, and computers with a significant variation in device display resolution. Visualizing data is typically performed by extracting data from a database, packaging it as JSON or XML for transmission to the client and then visualizing with a client-side JavaScript library. A major challenge is to retrieve only the required data for visualization. Current approaches require programmers to manually modify their data extraction queries and do not adapt to client display characteristics. The contribution in this work is a configurable data compression method that automatically adapts the amount of data transmitted for client-side visualization based on device characteristics. We evaluate several different techniques for time series summarization and compression and show that the amount of data transmitted can be reduced by between 40% and 80% while preserving pixel-perfect visualization. Reducing data transmitted improves client responsiveness and allows flexible and responsive web content without programmer intervention. The approach is tested on a wide variety of data sets and is implemented as an add-on for a JavaScript visualization library.