See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/343935293

Data Visualization in Internet of Things: Tools, Methodologies, and Challenges

Conference Paper · August 2020

DOI: 10.1145/3407023.3409228

CITATIONS READS
4 2,898

4 authors:

Antonis I Protopsaltis Panagiotis G. Sarigiannidis

University of Western Macedonia University of Western Macedonia
7 PUBLICATIONS   11 CITATIONS    263 PUBLICATIONS   2,257 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Dimitrios Margounakis Anastasios Lytos

International Hellenic University The University of Sheffield
50 PUBLICATIONS   127 CITATIONS    11 PUBLICATIONS   64 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Techniques for learning constraint satisfaction problems with applications in telecommunications View project

ArchGIS View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Antonis I Protopsaltis on 28 August 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Data Visualization in Internet of Things
Tools, Methodologies, and Challenges
Antonis Protopsaltis Panagiotis Sarigiannidis
Dept. of Electrical & Dept. of Electrical &
Computer Engineering Computer Engineering
University of Western University of Western
Macedonia Macedonia
Kozani, Greece Kozani, Greece
aprotopsaltis@uowm.gr psarigiannidis@uowm.gr
ABSTRACT
As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows rapidly, huge amounts of
wireless sensor networks emerged monitoring a wide range of
infrastructure, in various domains such as healthcare, energy,
transportation, smart city, building automation, agriculture, and
industry producing continuously streamlines of data. Big Data
technologies play a significant role within IoT processes, as visual
analytics tools, generating valuable knowledge in real-time in order
to support critical decision making. This paper provides a
comprehensive survey of visualization methods, tools, and
techniques for the IoT. We position data visualization inside the
visual analytics process by reviewing the visual analytics pipeline.
We provide a study of various chart types available for data
visualization and analyze rules for employing each one of them,
taking into account the special conditions of the particular use case.
We further examine some of the most promising visualization tools.
Since each IoT domain is isolated in terms of Big Data approaches,
we investigate visualization issues in each domain. Additionally,
we review visualization methods oriented to anomaly detection.
Finally, we provide an overview of the major challenges in IoT
visualizations.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Application Security, Intrusion detection and visualization,
Secure communication protocols
KEYWORDS
Internet of Things (IoT), Data Visualization, Big Data, Anomaly
Detection
ACM Reference format:
Antonis I. Protopsaltis, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Dimitrios Margounakis,
and Anastasios Lytos. 2020. Data Visualization in Internet of Things Tools,
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use
is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial
advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with
credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists,
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org.
ARES 2020, August 25–28, 2020, Virtual Event, Ireland
© 2020 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8833-7/20/08…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3407023.3409228
Antonis I. Protopsaltis, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Dimitrios Margounakis, and Anastasios Lytos. 2020. Data Visualization in Internet of Things
Tools, Methodologies, and Challenges. In Proceedings of 15th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2020).
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article No.: 110, Pages 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1145/3407023.3409228
The published work is available at ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3407023.3409228
Dimitrios Margounakis Anastasios Lytos
Sidroco Holdings Ltd Sidroco Holdings Ltd
Limassol, Cyprus Limassol, Cyprus
dmargoun@sidroco.com alytos@sidroco.com
Methodologies, and Challenges. In Proceedings of 15th International
Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2020), Dublin,
Ireland, 10 pages.
1 Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the most emerging and
powerful technologies that is used to improve the quality of life.
IoT connects together a great number of heterogeneous devices in
order to dynamically acquire various types of data from the real-
world environment. IoT data is used to mine useful information that
may be used, by context-aware applications, in order to improve
people’s daily life. As data is typically featured with contextual
information (time, location, status, etc), IoT turns into a valuable
and voluminous source of contextual data with variety (several
sources), velocity (real-time collection), veracity (uncertainty of
data) and value.
The cooperation of Big Data and IoT has initiated the development
of smart services for many complex infrastructures. As IoT
develops rapidly, Big Data technologies [89-92] play a critical role,
as visual analytics tools, producing valuable knowledge in real-
time, within the IoT infrastructures, aiming in supporting critical
decision making. Large-scale IoT applications employ a large
number of sensors resulting in a very large amount of collected
data. In the context of IoT data analysis, two tasks are of relevance:
exploring the large amounts of data to find subsets and patterns of
interest, and; analyzing the available data to make assessments and
predictions. This paper will exploit ways to gain insight from IoT
Data using meaningful visualizations.
Visual analytics is an analysis technique that can assist the
exploration of vast amounts of data by utilizing data mining,
statistics, and visualization. Interactive visualization tools combine
automated analysis and human interaction allowing user control
during the data analysis process, aiming in producing valuable
insight for decision making. They involve custom data
visualization methods that enable the operator to interact with them,
in order to view data through different perspectives and focus on
details of interest. Data analytics methods involve machine learning
and AI methods, to automatically extract patterns from data and
make predictions. AI methods are usually untrustworthy to their
operators, due to their black-box operation that does not provide
insight into the accuracy of their results. Visual analytics can be
used to make AI methods more transparent and explainable,
visualizing both their results and the way they work.
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
2 Visual Analytics Pipeline
Visual Analytics is a data analysis method that employs data
mining, statistics, and visualization. Besides automated analysis,
implementations of visual analytics tools combine human
interaction allowing user control and judgment during data
analysis, in order to produce valuable insight for decision making
[1,79]. Over the years, numerous research studies on visual
analytics were conducted. Most of them deal with a conventional
visual analytics pipeline originally presented by Keim et al [1]
which depicts the visual analytics process. As figure1 illustrates,
the visual analytics process starts performing data transformation
subprocesses, such as filtering and sampling, that modify the data
set into representations enabled for further exploration. To create
knowledge, the pipeline adopts either a visual exploration method
or an automatic analysis method, depending on the specific use
case. In the case of automatic analysis, data mining methods are
applied to assist the characterization of the data. The visual
interface is operated by analysts and decision-makers, to explore
and analyze the data. The framework of the Visual Analytics
Pipeline [2, 4, 5] has four core concepts: Data, Models,
Visualization, and Knowledge.
The Data module is responsible for the collection and pre-
processing of the raw and heterogeneous data. As data acquisition
is done in real-time through sensors, raw data sets are usually
incomplete, noisy, or inconsistent making it impossible for them to
be used directly in the Visualization or in the Models module. In
order to eliminate these difficulties, some data pre-processing has
to be applied to the original data sets. Data pre-processing is a
flexible process, depending on the quality of raw data. This module
includes pre-processing techniques such as data parsing, data
integration, data cleaning (elimination of redundancy, errors, and
invalid data), data transformation (normalization), and data
reduction. The Models module, is responsible for converting data
to information. This module includes conversion methods such as
feature selection and generation, model building, selection, and
validation.
Figure 1: Visual Analytics Pipeline
The Visualization module is responsible for visualizing and
abstractly transforming the data. This module includes techniques
for visual mapping (parallel coordinates, force-directed graphs,
chord graphs, scatter matrices), view generation and coordination,
human-computer interaction. The Knowledge module is
responsible for driving the process of transforming information into
meaningful insight using human machine interaction methods.
3 Visualization Charts Rules and Tools
Data visualization places data in an appropriate visual context that
triggers people’s understanding of its significance. This reduces the
overall effort to manually analyze the data. As a result,
A. Protopsaltis et al.
visualization and recognition of patterns within the IoT generated
data, play a significant role in the insight-gaining process, and
enhance the decision-making process.
Visualizing data plays a major role in data analytics since it
manifests the presentation of findings and its patterns concurrently
with the original data. Data visualization helps to interpret the
results by correlating the findings to the goals. It also exposes
hidden patterns, trends, and correlations, that otherwise would be
undetected, in an impactful and perceptible manner. As a result, it
assists the creation of good storytelling in terms of data and data
pattern understanding.
In this section, we will address different types of data charting.
Also, we will analyze chart selection rules, that take into account
special conditions that hold for a particular use case. Moreover, we
will present the most popular IoT visualization tools.
3.1 Types of Charts
In the lifeline of data visualization, data scientists operate various
visualization tools that implement many conventional visualization
techniques involving numerous kinds of plots and charts. Scatter-
plots visualize data instances as points in 2D or 3D spaces. When
plotting higher dimension data, the data is typically projected to a
lower dimension using multi-dimensional scaling [11] or principal
component analysis (PCA). Bar-plots depict the relative frequency
or relative density of different data items. Histograms and Bar-
charts are similar to Bar-plots but they offer a more fine-grained
approach to reveal the parameter distribution over time [13], while
the range of values is set into a series of intervals. Bubble-charts
allow the specification of higher dimension pictures in a smaller
dimension by projecting the third dimension on a 2D chart. The
third dimension can be the weight or the size of the bubble
corresponding to the point in the 2D space. Box-plots are specific
plots that show typical quantiles of the distribution of data and for
single dimension measures of central tendency and dispersion of
data.
Lines-plots are continuous curves that may be used to depict
functional dependencies between output variables.
Radial-charts show the different extents of the relative values that
each variable can take. Similar to these are the Spider charts that
show the achieved level by different dimensions.
Maps are useful for identifying the relative difference or behavior
in different parts of data or if the data has geographic information.
A map is a key data element for both input and output of a data
analytics algorithm indicating geographical data (google maps,
mapquest, OLA maps, etc.). An extension of a map is the Heat map
which illustrates the spatial distribution of a variable on a map [13].
Circular heatmaps are used to compactly depict the change of a
variable over a month [14], while circular heatmaps on a map are
used to explore the data from a spatiotemporal point of view [15].
Timelines are useful data elements that are utilized to understand
the evolution of one or more variables and the behavior of changing
trends or patterns over time from an analytics perspective point of
view.
Diagrams and Graphs are also extensions of charts used in special
cases. Trees are special data structures used for representing
scenarios with hierarchical decomposition. The Time-Correlation-
Partitioning (TCP) tree is a concise visual representation depicting
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland A. Protopsaltis et al.

the correlations of multiple environmental quality parameters and few data points, line-histogram for many data points) (figure 3).
their change over time based on information entropy [17]. Finally, Scatter-plots are mostly used in bivariate cases while in
networks are utilized to show linkages of people, things, computers, multivariate cases 3D-area charts may capture the objective of the
concepts etc. visualization.
SHAP summary plots [17] illustrate the distribution of feature
importance, given a trained model and a dataset. Each classifier
(feature vector) input is represented as a Colored dot, with the color
indicating the value of that feature. A dot is placed on the x-axis,
according to the contribution (positive or negative) of that feature
to the final model outcome. Colored dots on a map depict the
intensity of the measured parameter based on color-coding [13]. Figure 3: Evaluation of Data Set Distribution
Comparing data sets is an essential process when analyzing data
Clustering and dimensionality reduction methods are used to
that makes it possible to identify differences or similarities between
effectively visualize data patterns and their evolution over time.
data points or periods. Different groups of data concerning the same
Cluster storyline visualizations represent data patterns that are
period may be compared using a simple Bar-Chart (figure 4) for
based on derived clusters and capture their evolution over time in a
univariate cases or a Variable-Width Bar Chart for bivariate cases.
timeline graph [18]. Weighted complete graphs have also been
The main difference between the two is that the variable-width Bar
proposed to depict the total correlation of all dimensions in data
chart allows comparisons both on the height and the width of each
[19]. Polar systems with embedded circular pixel bar charts have
bar.
also been proposed as a technique to visualize multivariate
variables and vector variables.
3.2 Chart Selection Rules
To decide upon the kind of chart or visualization to be used for each
case, the context of the visualization must be first taken into
consideration. A visualization tool must consider different IoT data
sources and data types. Before charting, the number of the variables Figure 4: Compare different Data Sets on same time period
evaluating must be determined: a) Univariate Data, where a single
variable, discrete or continuous, needs to be tracked for its On the other hand, when the time variable is important, we compare
performance, value, trends, behavior, or the composition of the the same data set across different periods using a Circular Area
values; b) Bivariate Data, where two variables, either discrete or Chart (also called Radar or Spider Chart). This chart (figure 5)
continuous, need to be tracked. In this case, several complexities enables the comparison of multiple quantitative variables. Each
must be taken into account; c) Multivariate Data, where more than variable is represented by an axis calibrated radially starting from
two variables, either discrete or continuous, need to be tracked. the center. Each variable value is plotted along its axis and all the
Multivariate data, usually high dimensional sets, are difficult to variables are connected to form a polygon.
visualize and overwhelm human perception. Such cases go through
a model-based analysis phase, where dimension reduction
techniques make the visualization process feasible.
The main objectives of performing a visualization process are a) to
assess a relationship; b) to evaluate a distribution; c) to compare
data, and; d) to study a composition.
Assessing a relationship between data sets is called correlation, and Figure 5: Compare same Data Set on different time periods
it is performed in order to determine how these data sets combine Composition is the study of smaller parts that form a group (figure
and interact with each other. The correlation of different data sets 6). Pie charts are mostly used in such cases.
can be either positive or negative, meaning that their variables are
either supportive or working against each other. Scatter-plots
(figure 2) are mostly used in bivariate cases while in multivariate
cases Bubble-charts reveal insight very comprehensively.

Figure 6: Composition Study

Figure 2. Assessing Data Sets’ relationship
Evaluating a distribution aims to reveal the existence (or absence)
of patterns and their evolution over time. In univariate cases,
histograms are the best visualization option (column-histogram for
In composition cases where time variable is important, Pie Charts
may be productive in studying the change over time. For these cases
(figure 7) a Stacked-Bar Chart or a Stacked-Area Chart would best
present the composition of a data set that changes over time by
dividing the bars (or the area) among the categories in the data set.
In such cases, a time series data is stored in databases. Time series
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
data are measured over a certain duration based on a certain
predictable pattern or the current study condition.
Figure 7: Composition study over Time
A recent work, DeepEye [60], has presented a method for the
automatic selection of the appropriate type of visualization. This
method provides solutions to three problems: (1) Visualization
recognition, that evaluates the quality of an existing visualization
by training a binary classifier; (2) Visualization ranking, that selects
the best of two visualizations by using a supervised learning-to-
rank model and relying on experts’ rules; and (3) Visualization
selection, that efficiently computes the top-k visualizations for an
existing data set by addressing optimizations.
3.3 IoT Data Visualization Tools
Visualization tools assist the decision-making process since they
provide strong data analytics that help interpreting big data
acquired from the various IoT devices. IoT data visualization
systems involve custom dashboard design that, given a set of
measurements acquired by several geographically scattered IoT
sensors, and several AI models applied to the data, allows the
operator to explore the available raw measurements and gain
insight about the models’ operation. The main aim of these systems
is to enhance the operator’s trust in the models.
A flexible visualization system should maintain some core
characteristics such as the ability to update in real-time,
interactivity, transparency, and explainability. Since, IoT
measurements are highly dynamic, with new measurements being
collected in real-time, dashboards should be able to update in real-
time as new measurements become available. The dashboard
should provide an interactive user interface allowing operators to
engage with the data and explore them. The dashboard should also
provide means of looking into the applied AI models and visualize
their internals, to enhance the transparency and explainability of the
models.
Many proposed visualization platforms are designed based on SOA
(Service Oriented Architecture) with four key services: Data
Collection Service, that receives data; Data Visualization Service,
that observes the data intuitively; Dynamic Dashboard Service,
providing an interface that organizes and displays various
information such as text, the value of the machine, or the
visualization result; and Data Analytic Service, that delivers
statistical analysis tools and consists of three main layers Big Data
Infrastructure as a Service, Big Data Platform as a Service, and Big
Data Analytics Software as a Service [93].
The most widely used IoT Data visualization tools, across several
industries globally, will be summarized in this section. Each one
was compared against the following criteria: open-source tool, the
ability to integrate with popular data sources (MapR Hadoop Hive,
Salesforce, Google Analytics, Cloudera Hadoop, etc.), interactive
visualization, client-type (desktop, online or mobile app),
availability of APIs for customization and embedding purposes.
A. Protopsaltis et al.
Tableau is a fast and flexible data visualization tool, allowing user
interaction. Its user interface provides a wide range of fixed and
custom visualizations employing a great variety of intuitive charts.
In-depth analyses may be accomplished by R-scripting. It supports
most data formats and connections to various servers such as
Amazon Aurora, Cloudera Hadoop, and Salesforce. Tableau’s
online service is publicly available but it supports limited storage.
Server and desktop versions are available under commercial
licenses.
ThingsBoard [3] is an open-source IoT platform containing
modules for device management, data collection, processing, and
visualization. The platform allows the creation of custom IoT
dashboards containing widgets that visualize sensor data collected
through multiple devices. It contains a set of features including line
and bar chart modules for both historical and real-time data
visualizations. It also contains map widgets enabling object
tracking on online maps. Its complex stack technology (Java,
Python, C++, JavaScript) provides error-free performance and real-
time data analytics. It supports standard IoT protocols for device
connectivity (e.g. MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP). It can be integrated
with Node-Red [20], a flow-based programming platform for IoT,
through a custom function.
Plotly is an online cloud-based public data visualization service. It
is built using Python and Django frameworks. It provides various
data storage services and modules for IoT visualization and
analytics. It allows the creation of online dashboards employing a
wide range of charts such as statistical, scientific, 3D, multiple axes
charts, etc. It provides Python, R, MATLAB and Julia based APIs
for in-depth analyses. Also, graphics libraries such as ggplot2,
matplotlib, and MATLAB chart conversion techniques enhance the
visualizations. Its internal tool Web Plot Digitizer (WPD) may
automatically grab data from static images. It is publicly available
with limited chart features and storage while its full set of chart
features are available through a professional membership license.
IBM Watson IoT Platform is a cloud platform as a service
supporting several programming languages, services, and
integrated DevOps in order to deploy and manage cloud
applications. It features a set of built-in web applications while it
provides support for 3rd-party software integration via REST APIs.
The visualization of static and dynamic data is provided through
effortless creation of custom diagrams, graphs, and tables. It
provides access to device properties and alert management. Node-
RED may be used for IoT device connection, APIs, and online
services. Sensor data, stored in Cloudant NoSQL DB, may be
processed for further data analysis.
Power BI is a powerful business analytics service based on the
cloud. It provides a rich set of interactive visualizations and
detailed analysis reports for large enterprises. It is designed to trace
and visualize various sensor gathered data. The platform works in
cooperation with Azure cloud-based analytics and cognitive
services. It consists of 3 basic components: Power BI Desktop,
report generator; Service (SaaS), report publisher; and Apps, report
viewer, and dashboard. Numerous types of source integrations are
supported while rich data visualizations are also provided. Among
other methods, data may be queried using the natural language
query feature. Data analysis is accomplished both in real-time
streaming and static historic data. Power BI provides sub-
components that enable IoT integration. The desktop version of the
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland A. Protopsaltis et al.

software is publicly available with a major restriction of cloud specifically, Augmented Reality (AR) plays a significant role as
services access. information visualization and interaction medium. In this sense,
some generic and scalable AR frameworks have been developed
Gephi is an open-source tool specializing in graph and network
for IoT infrastructures [29, 30], providing IoT visualizations within
analysis providing interactive network exploration and
a user-friendly environment. The utilization of AR user
interpretation and dynamic network visualization. Since it is
environments aims to enhance user perception of the visualized IoT
designed in Java and OpenGL, its GPU 3D render engine
data patterns. AR technologies provide humans the ability to
accelerates its performance [23] making it capable of displaying
visually monitor and process the operation of the IoT infrastructure
large network analyses in real-time. Its flexible and multi-tasking
in real-time.
architecture is able to process very large and complex data sets and
produce meaningful visual results. It provides functions for These days, Immersive Virtual Reality is recognized as one of the
network data spatializing, filtering, navigating, manipulating, and most promising technologies that enables virtual interactions with
clustering. Even though there is no programming skills required, a physical systems. The user is situated within a 3D environment
good knowledge of graphs is considered necessary. where data visualizations and physical space are matched in a sense
that it provides users the ability to orient, navigate, and interact
Grafana, is an emerging open-source data visualization tool. It
naturally. These frameworks [28,80] utilize hybrid collaborative
focuses on time-series metric data analysis and monitoring over a
multi-modal methods to enable collaboration between users and
period of time. As such, it supports several time-series data storage
provide intuitive and natural interaction within a specific virtual
backends. It provides real-time feed allowing data analysis reports
environment. As users remain immersed within a 3D virtual
in near real-time. Its dynamic and interactive visual dashboard
environment, immersive reality applications require sophisticated
covers multiple functionalities, supports highly customized
approaches for interacting with the IoT data analytics visualization.
queries, and provides several charting capabilities for analyzing
As such, immersive analytics is the visualization outcome within
and presenting the data, such as Heat maps, Geo Maps, Histograms,
IoT infrastructures. Immersive analytics frameworks promote a
Charts – Pie/Bar, Graphs. Grafana supports various data sources
better understanding of the IoT ecosystem and enhance decision-
seamlessly like Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
making. To ensure such a collaborative virtual environment
Graphite, Prometheus, OpenTSDB, and KairosDB. It provides
presupposes highly responsive connectivity that may be
cloud storage allowing complete control of the infrastructure. It
accomplished by employing high-speed 5G network
also provides alert notifications in the case of an unfavorable event
infrastructures, which provide ultra-low-delay and ultra-high-
occurrence.
reliable communications.
Kibana Tool is an open-source data visualization tool specializing
Similarly, a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a set of physical
in data analysis of large sets. It is a component of the ELK Stack, a
devices, connected through a communication network, that
set three tools: ElasticSearch, LogStash, Kibana [16]. Even though
communicates with its virtual cyberspace. Each physical object is
Elasticsearch and Logstash may operate independently, the three
associated with a cyber model that stores all information and
products were initially designed as an integrated solution. Logstash
knowledge of it. This cyber model is called “Digital Twin” [31,32].
is responsible for data acquisition from the various remote sources
It allows data transfer from the physical to the cyber part. However,
while Elasticsearch provides its database services to Kibana which
in a specific CPS, where every physical object has a digital twin
is responsible for data presentation. Beats, the fourth product added
counterpart, the spatiotemporal relations between the individual
to the stack, serves as a lightweight shipper sending data from edge
digital twins are far more valuable than the actual digital twin. The
devices to Logstash. The Elastic Stack may either be deployed or
generation of Digital twins may be accomplished using 3D
be used as cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS). A set of
technologies [26,27] through AR/VR/MR or even hologram
community plugins are also available. Kibana provides a web-
devices. Digital twins integrate various technologies such as
based interface for search, view, and analyses of data stored in
Haptics, Humanoid Robotics as well as Soft Robotics, 5G and
Elasticsearch cluster. It consists of 4 main components: Discover,
Tactile Internet, Cloud Computing Offloading, Wearable
for interactive data browsing and analyses; Visualize, for data
technology, IoT Contextual data, and AI.
visualization that utilizes various plugins and visual aids (for
production of bar charts, pie charts, heat maps, line graphs, timeline 4 IoT domains and Visualization
visualizations, coordinate/region maps, etc); Dashboards, for
presentation of combined multiple results from Discover and IoT technologies have already entered into various significant
Visualize into one interactive view that may easily produce reports domains of our life. The growing market competition and
for future references; and Management, for internal configuration. inexpensive connectivity have emerged the Internet of things (IoT)
across many domains. Connected sensors, devices, and machines
A plethora of JavaScript libraries, frameworks, and toolkits are also via the Internet are the “things” in IoT. The enormous volume of
available for building custom front-end visualizations such as IoT data provides the information needed to be analyzed to gain
TimelineJS, Angular, the JavaScript Data-Driven Documents D3.js knowledge. Visual analytics, involving data analysis methods,
library, the Three.js WebGL 2D/3D rendering library, and several artificial intelligence, and visualization, aims to improve domain
JavaScript frameworks and utility libraries such as Underscore.js, operations with concerning efficiency, flexibility, and safety.
Backbone.js, and JQuery. In such cases, the back-end technology
is served by the powerful, in massive data cases, NoSQL databases. The employment of IoT smart devices facilitates the transformation
of traditional domains into modern, smart, and autonomous
Nowadays, the continued innovations and evolutions in computer domains. Over the past recent years, many traditional domains such
vision, mobile computing, and portable display devices have made as healthcare, energy, industry, transportation, city and building
human interaction with machines very natural and effective. More management, and agriculture have become IoT-based with
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
intelligent human-to-machine (H2M) and machine-to-machine
(M2M) communication. In this section we will investigate the
visualization approaches applied through the different IoT
domains.
4.1 Healthcare
IoT is applied in Healthcare to collect and analyze real-time
medical data aiming to create actionable medical insight and
minimize traditional medical treatment limitations [33]. Medical
data, acquired through smart devices, is stored and analyzed in
cloud platforms for different stakeholders. A such, a patient’s
health status may be remotely monitored by ubiquitous healthcare
applications.
Data analysis and visualization in healthcare often reveals hidden
patterns in data, producing valuable insight for better planning, and
cost-efficiency. Many healthcare applications integrate web-portals
with GIS facilitating the visualization and monitoring of data in
real-time. The enormous amounts and the high dimensionality of
data is a visualization challenge that is resolved through
granulation. As such, data visualization tools face many difficulties
in terms of poor performances in functionality, scalability, and
response time. New frameworks, that model and characterize
visualization strategies, utilize clustering and machine learning
techniques for the visualization of large datasets. This approach
takes into consideration the desired display resolution before
determining the result’s rendering precision which reduces the
potential computation time.
4.2 Smart Grid
A Smart grid is an emerging intelligent electricity distribution
system. It utilizes IoT to integrate renewable resources in power
systems, accurately control the grid, and allow optimal power
consumption [37,49,88]. Smart Grid employs IoT technologies to
provide smart services [38,39] such as distribution and
consumption management, advanced metering infrastructure
management, renewable energy integration, anomaly detection,
self-healing systems, and energy storage. The utilization of big data
technologies produces intelligent insight [21-22,81-84] and
efficient power management [40].
Data visualization plays a key role in improving the assessment of
the smart grid. The aim of visualization in the smart grid is to
present current and historical energy-consumption patterns to gain
knowledge about their energy profiles. There is a great number of
visualization techniques [25,43,52] based on multivariate and high
dimensional data sets, providing the ability to construct 2D or even
3D visualizations. On the other hand, smart grids involve enormous
variables that complicate 3D data presentation (3D Power-map,
etc). For high dimensional data cases, scatter diagrams, parallel
coordinates, and Andrew curves may resolve the presentation
problem. Also, visualized graphs and charts in smart grids present
granular and explicit changes in the voltage and frequency.
However, correlations or trends between multi-source data lack
effective representation.
4.3 Smart city and Transportation
Smart city applications, aim in analyzing city dynamics through
representation, visualization, and evaluation processes. They
employ IoT technologies to optimize the cooperation of various
public systems and services, such as waste management, city
A. Protopsaltis et al.
cleaning, car parking, street lighting, and emergency control [41].
Such systems [44] must be able to process both historical and real-
time data produced in the smart environment [28,34,80] to build
valuable knowledge necessary to support the operation of a Smart
City [45,46].
IoT technologies, have advanced Transportation systems to more
intelligent and ubiquitous [47] and contributed to a sustainable
smart environment [35,36,50]. IoT sensors produce continuously a
vast amount of data that is used for route planning, surveillance
applications, emergency management, traffic control, traffic
prediction, and anomaly detection.
Since smart cities involve heterogeneous multi-source and multi-
modal trace data, such as mobile devices, vehicles, smart cards,
floating sensors, and localization systems (GPS, Wi-Fi, GSM,
Bluetooth, and payment records), a cross-domain context
visualization framework is a major challenge. Visualization
techniques in transportation may intuitively display the spatial and
temporal distribution of network congestion through a map-based
platform with rich content, filters, and a variety of graphs. Trained
RNN-RBM models, reveal network congestion evolution patterns,
and facilitate the comprehension of congestion generation and the
prediction of future trends of congestion evolution. Such
frameworks offer a rich set of capabilities of multi-data source
processing and analysis that lead to valuable insights concerning
critical incidents in traffic monitoring, multi-modal connectivity in
urban planning, development or modification of policy parameters,
and viability and feasibility of multi-modal routing.
4.4 Smart Buildings
Large sets of IoT devices in smart buildings collect sensitive timely
data providing detailed interactions between humans and machines
[51]. A large number of building IoT sensors collect high-
resolution meter recordings from heating, ventilation, air-
conditioning, lighting, digital video, access control, intrusion
detection, fire detection, alarms, weather conditions, and
demographics. The integration of these heterogeneous IoT devices
enables smart services, called building analytics, which are utilized
to monitor and forecast citizens’ activities [54,55]. The offered
smart services in smart buildings are further optimized through the
employment of general, personal, and critical gathered data.
Visualizations provide a high-level summary of gas, electricity, or
water consumption. Benchmarking of building portfolios and
anomaly detection techniques help users detect possible deviations
from the baseline and identify the cause. The prediction of future
energy consumption and its variance is important for the effective
diagnosis and tracing of abnormal consumptions.
4.5 Smart Agriculture
Agriculture is a highly complex system that depends on the climate,
weather, soil conditions, plant types, and so on. Nowadays, smart
agriculture applications employ IoT technologies, to collect and
process various sensor data, to enhance crop management, assure
improved productivity and product quality, with minimum energy
consumption and maximum customer satisfaction. The
establishment of sustainable agriculture due to the effects of global
warming and frequent extreme weather conditions is increasingly
important.
Visualization systems empower long-term field monitoring of
factors, analyzing data acquired from IoT sensor devices.
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
Monitoring and control systems are important for plant growth
management, crop anomaly detection, and the strengthening of
protection measures against attacks by pests and diseases [57,58].
The determination of optimal environmental conditions for each
agricultural activity effectively optimizes cultivation and crop
management processes and further enhances the product quality.
4.6 Industry
The trend of digitization in industry (often called Industry 4.0)
generates large amounts of data by sensors and data recordings
from almost all machines and devices of the production process
with the promise of creating new usage opportunities [64,70]. The
extraction of valuable knowledge from generated data from all
stages of the industrial product life cycle (PLC), can improve
product costs, quality and increased flexibility [68,69]. IoT
applications for industrial automation are adopted aiming in the
optimization of industry’s procedures and the growth of global
economy [59,60]. Industrial IoT applications are utilized to produce
real-time analyses in product supply chain management,
performance evaluation, simulation, modeling, digital learning
factories, intelligent Machine-to-Machine, Human-to-Machine,
and Machine-to-Infrastructure communications, energy saving [65]
and industrial wireless networks [66,67]. The future of
manufacturing is closely dependent on the industry’s ability to
connect systems for collaboration, optimize manufacturing
processes and adopt self-learning systems.
However, observing and analyzing large industrial data sets is often
overwhelming for human perception. The vast volume of
manufacturing data, imposes a great challenge of making full use
of these invaluable datasets. Τhe collected sensed data is
characterized by a high degree of abstraction and strong bonding to
corresponding manufacturing operations. As a result, analyzing
relations among different data is extremely complex and difficult
to visualize. Visualizations aim to assist end-users, in easing their
daily operations, and decision-makers, in determining the
industry’s structure, by visualizing operations and behaviors and
identifying key players. Visualization of knowledge is classified
into three categories: useful values, significant trends, and
managerial rules. It is accomplished through statistics and machine
learning approaches for operator performance insights, and through
statistics and prediction models for production progress insights.
Visualization packages used in industry offer various network
layout algorithms. Most commonly used layouts are derivations of
force directed layouts, in which prominent nodes are drawn in the
center and less prominent ones are pushed to the periphery. Nodes
close to each other have stronger associations.
5 Visual-Aided Anomaly Detection
The previous section depicted that most IoT domains require
anomaly detection techniques. Anomaly detection deals with the
discovery of rare occurrences in data sets aiming to reveal
suspicious behaviors. Many techniques have been developed for
the identification of outliers and the detection of abnormal cases
through unstructured multi-dimensional data sets. Literature
reviews [71-73] has shown that anomaly detection has been mainly
approached through machine learning or statistical techniques.
Nevertheless, the effective application of these techniques is
dependent on two major challenges in anomaly detection problem:
a) there is no clear identification and interpretation of normal and
abnormal cases; and b) training and verification of models is a
A. Protopsaltis et al.
rather problematic process due to unavailable training data. In IoT
environments, the situation often gets aggravated due to the
enormous volume of data flows. Even though the huge data input
provides valuable, streaming, spatiotemporal and contextual
information about anomalous cases, normal cases are characterized
by high veracity and volatility. As such, big IoT data requires a
flexible and adaptive method that, using the rich context
information, will effectively identify and interpret normal and
abnormal cases. Existing visual analytics methods provide
solutions [74-77] to this problem but they are not flexible and
adaptive enough to handle large, complex, and dynamic data
environments.
Literature [48,49,59,61-63] shows that visual analytics can be very
advantageous in the anomaly detection process. However, in IoT
systems, the anomaly definition is driven by the dynamic,
streaming, spatiotemporal big data which is usually characterized
by heterogeneity and multidimensionality. “Soft” knowledge, the
additional human knowledge, is often undefined or unavailable to
the machine-centric approach. Consequently, capturing anomalous
patterns in IoT data, while adapting to data changes and
accumulated human knowledge in the system, is a rather
challenging task. Additionally, existing visualization solutions [74-
77] and modern spatiotemporal visualization platforms [79-84], are
unable to represent intuitively and comprehensively such data and
anomalous patterns along with their spatiotemporal context.
Moreover, the existing monitoring systems for spatiotemporal
anomalies do not produce satisfying results, since they do not
support online anomaly investigation and analytical reasoning that
incorporate human judgment.
Various visualization techniques have been utilized to assist the
anomaly detection and evaluation process. Particularly, time series
charts and histograms are the most commonly used statistical
diagrams to represent anomalous cases [85-87]. Different types of
dimension reduction and multidimensional visualizations
techniques are used to visualize data distributions and detect
outliers: multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), principle component
analysis (PCA), self-organizing map (SOM), and parallel
coordinates.
Network anomalies occur due to various internal or external
factors: network device failures, distributed denial of service
(DDoS) attacks, and worms. Traditional traffic volume analysis
methods often identify these causes as abnormal traffic patterns.
Recently, considerable attention has been given to traffic anomaly
detection methods that are based on Entropy as they provide more
detailed metrics for traffic distribution patterns than the traditional
methods. Time-series analysis is the main method used for traffic
anomaly detection based on entropy since it helps to identify single
traffic distributions and distributional changes over time. The
visualization of multiple entropy-based time series may be
accomplished utilizing timeline methods while its analysis may use
intelligent or manual methods that detect potential traffic
anomalies.
Data objects often contain inter-dependencies that must be taken
into account during the anomaly detection process. Recently,
considerable focus has been given to anomaly detection techniques
for structured graph data [35,59,81]. Graph’s robust and powerful
machinery could effectively represent and capture long-range
correlations among inter-dependent IoT data objects. The graph
structure, incorporates nodes, edges, and attributes/types, and may
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
naturally represent data inter-dependencies creating links between
the related objects. Long-range correlations between related IoT
data objects may effectively be represented using graph’s multiple
paths. Additionally, anomalies’ relational nature may be
represented intuitively using a graph.
6 Challenges and Future Work
Visual analytics main objective is to discover knowledge and
produce actionable insight. This is succeeded by processing large
and complex data sets through by integrating techniques from
various fields such as data analysis, data management,
visualization, knowledge discovery, analytical reasoning, human
perception, and human-computer interaction. Even though
visualization is an important entity in Big IoT data analytics, most
visualization tools exhibit poor performance results in terms of
functionality, scalability, interaction, infrastructure, insight
creation, and evaluation.
6.1 Functionality
Common functionality issues in IoT data visualization are caused
due to the huge volume of data sets, their high dimension, and their
streaming nature: (1) Data overloading, over-plotting, and
overlapping [42] are the most common symptoms of IoT data sets.
The state-of-the-art techniques use methods for dimensionality
reduction, hierarchical exploration, caching, prefetching [42],
incremental and adaptive processing [78] to properly visualize the
enormous volume data. Data cleaning methods are also applied to
remove outliers. Applying cleaning and reduction methods to
visible data sets is a challenging task since they may cause
information loss. On the other hand, effective visualizations of fine
grained dimensions increase the probability of identifying
observable correlations, patterns, and outliners; (2) Visualizing
heterogeneous and diverse data (unstructured, structured, and semi-
structured) is an essential and challenging task; (3) Additionally, as
data sets are often closely related to each other, visualizations
contain visual noise that confuses human’s perception creating
different visualizations of the same type; (4) In cases of presenting
large data sets, current data visualizations tools face great challenge
in fitting the entire set in screen due to aspect ratio, device
resolution, and physical perception limits. These issues often
overwhelm user’s perceptual and cognitive capacities [12]; (5) In
IoT environments visualization systems must be responsive in real-
time since data is generated dynamically. This imposes the
challenge of optimal network bandwidth that supports high network
performance and low latency requirements; (6) As IoT
environments growth rate is enormous, power and bandwidth
constraints impose that data should be stored locally to efficiently
obtain usable information. As such, data locality is a significant
challenge for visualization systems to achieve efficient outcome;
(7) The explosion of IoT data volumes requires the use parallel
visualization architectures. As a result, the decomposition of a task
into independent subtasks that enforce concurrent execution of
visualization subprocesses is an essential challenge for parallel
visualization algorithms [53]; (8) Human error and
oversimplification of data form a major issue in data visualization.
Although, the use of machine learning techniques reduces this type
of issues, literature review shows that IoT analytics mostly focus
on data cleaning, data mining, exploratory analysis and diagnostics
methods, and very few of them address the use of machine learning.
6.2 Scalability
A. Protopsaltis et al.
The exploration of large and complex data sets imposes a
significant challenge. Visual-analytics techniques must be scalable
to fit their functionality according to the size and dimension of the
data. However, human’s overwhelmed perceptual and cognitive
capacities impose difficulties in exploring and interacting with
large and complex data sets, making scalability a great challenge
for visual analytics.
6.3 Interactivity
Main aim of visualization systems is to assist decision-making. As
such, visualization systems must be interactive allowing a
significant set of possible user interactions. Literature review
shows that the development of an extensive and thorough recording
of all possible interactions that may be performed on a visualization
system is still a challenge. Such a taxonomy would record each
individual user interaction along with its cognitive and perceptual
impact.
6.4 Infrastructure
As stated previously, numerous dimensionality reduction methods
have been developed and employed in the visualization of complex
and high-dimensional IoT data. However, these methods are not
suitable and cannot be reused for all types of presented data. As
such, a significant challenge is the development of infrastructure
containing a common framework. Most proposed frameworks
cannot be reused for all types of data since they were designed
specifically for a particular domain.
6.5 Insight Creation
Main objective of visual analytics is the creation of valuable
knowledge that will integrate with human judgment into the data
analysis process and enhance decision-making. Consequently, a
fundamental challenge is the creation of meaningful visualization
results maximizing human capacity, and perception, to facilitate
data exploration, analytical reasoning and gain better insights.
6.6 Evaluation
In the field of Human Computer Interaction, engineers evaluate a
user interface by taking into consideration important factors such
as user cognition, perception, and analytical reasoning. Since a
visualization system is a user interaction system, these three factors
are also important for the visual-analytics process. As such, to
create better visualization systems there must be an evaluation of
the designed utilities for their effectiveness, and trustworthiness.
However, the complex functionality of visual-analytics
applications makes its evaluation challenging.
7 Conclusion
The emergence of IoT increased drastically the growth rate of data
production creating large and complex data sets. The integration of
human judgment within the data analysis process enables visual
analytics in discovering knowledge and gaining valuable insight
from these data sets. In this process, every piece of IoT data is
considered crucial for the extraction of information and useful
patterns. Human cognitive and perceptual capabilities identify
patterns efficiently when data is represented visually. Data
visualization methods face several challenges in handling the
voluminous and streaming IoT data without compromising
performance and response time matters.
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
This paper provides a comprehensive survey of visualization
methods, tools, and techniques for the IoT. In this sense, we
reviewed the classic visual analytics pipeline [1] that fits the data
visualization subtask within the entire visual analytics process. We
studied various chart types available for data visualization and
analyzed rules for employing each one of them taking into account
the special conditions of the particular use case. We also examined
some of the most promising visualization tools and presented useful
details about them. Visualization techniques can boost the decision-
making process by enabling human cognition and perception within
various IoT domains. We investigated the various IoT domains
since each one imposes different analytics requirements isolating
the evolution of Big Data approaches. The increased amount of
network security events has emerged Anomaly Detection
techniques, which focus on revealing suspicious behaviors in IoT
data sets, by identifying outliers and rare occurrences. We further
reviewed visualization methods that assist anomaly detection.
Finally, we identified major challenges and future directions
concerning visualizations in IoT in terms of functionality,
scalability, interaction, infrastructure, insight creation, and
evaluation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research leading to these results has received funding from
the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under grant agreement No 833955.
REFERENCES
[1] Keim, D., Andrienko, G., Fekete, J., Görg, C., Kohlhammer, J. and Melançon, G.
(2008). Visual Analytics: Definition, Process, and Challenges. Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, pp.154-175.
[2] Sun, G.D., Wu, Y.C., Liang, R.H., Liu, S.X. (2013) A survey of visual analytics
techniques and applications: State-of-the-art research and future challenges. J.
Comput. Sci. Technol. 28(5), 852–867
[3] De Paolis, L. T., De Luca, V., & Paiano, R. (2018) Sensor Data collection and
analytics with ThingsBoard and Spark Streaming. IEEE Workshop on
Environmental, Energy, and Structural Monitoring Systems (EESMS) (pp. 1-6).
[4] Keim, D., Kohlhammer, J., Ellis, G., Mansmann, F. (2010) Mastering the
Information Age-Solving Problems with Visual Analytics. Eurographics
Association
[5] Wang, X.M., Zhang, T.Y., Ma, Y.X., Xia, J., Chen, W. (2016) A survey of visual
analytic pipelines. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 31(4), 787–804
[6] Keim D., Hao M. C., Dayal U. (2002) Hierarchical pixel bar charts. IEEE
Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 8(3): 255-269.
[7] Tatu A., Albuquerque G., Eisemann M. et al. (2011) Automated analytical
methods to support visual exploration of high-dimensional data. IEEE
Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(5): 584-597.
[8] Turkay C., Lundervold A., Lundervold A. J., Hauser H. (2012) Representative
factor generation for the interactive visual analysis of high-dimensional data.
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 18(12): 2621-2630.
[9] Lu Z., Liu C., Zhang Q., Zhang C., Fan D., Yang P. (2013) Visual analytics for
the clustering capability of data. Science China Information Sciences, 56(5):
052110(14).
[10] Keim D., Kriegel H. P. (1996) Visualization techniques for mining large
databases: A comparison. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
Engineering, 8(6): 923-938.
[11] Wong P. C., Foote H., Adams D., Cowley W., Thomas J. (2003) Dynamic
visualization of transient data streams. In Proceedings of the Annual IEEE
Conference on Information Visualization (INFOVIS). 97–104.
[12] Tavel, P. (2007) Modeling and simulation design, AK Peters Ltd. Natick, MA
[13] Chen P. (2019) Visualization of real-time monitoring datagraphic of urban
environmental quality. EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 2019,
1 (2019), 42.
[14] Li H., Fan H., Mao F. (2016) A visualization approach to air pollution data
exploration - a case study of air quality index (PM2.5) in Beijing, China.
Atmosphere 7, 3, 35.
[15] Lu, W., Ai, T., Zhang, X., & He, Y. (2017). An interactive web mapping
visualization of urban air quality monitoring data of China. Atmosphere, 8(8),
148.
A. Protopsaltis et al.
[16] Bajer, M. (2017, August). Building an IoT data hub with Elasticsearch, Logstash
and Kibana. In 2017 5th International Conference on Future Internet of Things
and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW) (pp. 63-68). IEEE.
[17] Lundberg, S. M., Erion, G. G., & Lee, S. I. (2018). Consistent individualized
feature attribution for tree ensembles. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.03888.
[18] Zhou, Z., Ye, Z., Liu, Y., Liu, F., Tao, Y., & Su, W. (2017). Visual analytics for
spatial clusters of air-quality data. IEEE computer graphics and applications,
37(5), 98-105.
[19] Qu, H., Chan, W. Y., Xu, A., Chung, K. L., Lau, K. H., & Guo, P. (2007). Visual
analysis of the air pollution problem in Hong Kong. IEEE Transactions on
Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13(6), 1408-1415.
[20] Lekić, M., Gardašević, G. (2018). IoT sensor integration to Node-RED platform.
In 2018 17th International Symposium INFOTEH-JAHORINA (INFOTEH) (pp.
1-5). IEEE
[21] Zhu, J., Zhuang, E., Ivanov, C., & Yao, Z. (2011). A data-driven approach to
interactive visualization of power systems. IEEE Transactions on Power
Systems, 26(4), 2539-2546.
[22] Zhou, K., Fu, C., & Yang, S. (2016). Big data driven smart energy management:
From big data to big insights. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 56,
215-225.
[23] Bastian, M., Heymann, S., & Jacomy, M. (2009). Gephi: an open source software
for exploring and manipulating networks. In Third international AAAI
conference on weblogs and social media.
[24] Simmhan, Y., Aman, S., Kumbhare, A., Liu, R., Stevens, S., Zhou, Q., &
Prasanna, V. (2013). Cloud-based software platform for big data analytics in
smart grids. Computing in Science & Engineering, 15(4), 38-47.
[25] Zhou, D., et al (2016). Distributed data analytics platform for wide-area
synchrophasor measurement systems. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 7(5),
2397-2405.
[26] El Saddik, A. (2018). Digital twins: The convergence of multimedia
technologies. IEEE multimedia, 25(2), 87-92.
[27] Canedo, A. (2016). Industrial IoT lifecycle via digital twins. In Proceedings of
the Eleventh IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software
Codesign and System Synthesis (pp. 1-1).
[28] Lv, Z., Yin, T., Zhang, X., Song, H., & Chen, G. (2016). Virtual reality smart
city based on WebVRGIS. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 3(6), 1015-1024.
[29] Jo, D., & Kim, G. J. (2016). ARIoT: scalable augmented reality framework for
interacting with Internet of Things appliances everywhere. IEEE Transactions on
Consumer Electronics, 62(3), 334-340.
[30] Michalakis, K., Aliprantis, J., & Caridakis, G. (2018). Visualizing the internet of
things: Naturalizing human-computer interaction by incorporating ar features.
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, 7(3), 64-72.
[31] Lee, E. A. (2008, May). Cyber physical systems: Design challenges. In 2008 11th
IEEE International Symposium on Object and Component-Oriented Real-Time
Distributed Computing (ISORC) (pp. 363-369). IEEE.
[32] Baheti, R., & Gill, H. (2011). Cyber-physical systems. The impact of control
technology, 12(1), 161-166.
[33] Zgheib, R., Conchon, E., & Bastide, R. (2017). Engineering IoT healthcare
applications: towards a semantic data driven sustainable architecture. In eHealth
360° (pp. 407-418). Springer, Cham.
[34] Pan, G., Qi, G., Zhang, W., Li, S., Wu, Z., & Yang, L. T. (2013). Trace analysis
and mining for smart cities: issues, methods, and applications. IEEE
Communications Magazine, 51(6), 120-126.
[35] Rathore, M. M., Ahmad, A., Paul, A., & Jeon, G. (2015, November). Efficient
graph-oriented smart transportation using internet of things generated big data.
In 2015 11th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-
Based Systems (SITIS) (pp. 512-519). IEEE.
[36] Kalamaras, I., Zamichos, A., Salamanis, A., Drosou, A., Kehagias, D. D.,
Margaritis, G., ... & Tzovaras, D. (2017). An interactive visual analytics platform
for smart intelligent transportation systems management. IEEE Transactions on
Intelligent Transportation Systems, 19(2), 487-496.
[37] Chren, S., & Buhnova, B. (2016, October). Local load optimization in smart grids
with Bayesian networks. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) (pp. 004021-004027). IEEE.
[38] Emmanuel, M., & Rayudu, R. (2017). Evolution of dispatchable photovoltaic
system integration with the electric power network for smart grid applications: A
review. Renewable and Sustainable energy reviews, 67, 207-224.
[39] Collier, S. E. (2016). The emerging enernet: Convergence of the smart grid with
the internet of things. IEEE Industry Applications Magazine, 23(2), 12-16.
[40] Jaradat, M., Jarrah, M., Bousselham, A., Jararweh, Y., & Al-Ayyoub, M. (2015).
The internet of energy: smart sensor networks and big data management for smart
grid.
[41] Talari, S., Shafie-Khah, M., Siano, P., Loia, V., Tommasetti, A., & Catalão, J. P.
(2017). A review of smart cities based on the internet of things concept. Energies,
10(4), 421.
[42] Bikakis, N. (2018). Big data visualization tools. arXiv preprint arXiv
:1801.08336.
 EPESec 2020, August, 2020, Dublin, Ireland
[43] Jarrah Nezhad, A., Wijaya, T. K., Vasirani, M., & Aberer, K. (2014). SmartD:
Smart meter data analytics dashboard. In Proceedings of the 5th international
conference on Future energy systems (pp. 213-214).
[44] Cheng, B., Longo, S., Cirillo, F., Bauer, M., & Kovacs, E. (2015). Building a big
data platform for smart cities: Experience and lessons from santander. In 2015
IEEE International Congress on Big Data (pp. 592-599). IEEE.
[45] Gomes, E., Dantas, M. A., de Macedo, D. D., De Rolt, C., Brocardo, M. L., &
Foschini, L. (2016). Towards an infrastructure to support big data for a smart city
project. In 2016 IEEE 25th International Conference on Enabling Technologies:
Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE) (pp. 107-112). IEEE.
[46] Moreno, M. V., Terroso-Sáenz, F., González-Vidal, A., Valdés-Vela, M.,
Skarmeta, A. F., Zamora, M. A., & Chang, V. (2016). Applicability of big data
techniques to smart cities deployments. IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Informatics, 13(2), 800-809.
[47] Cheng, J., Wu, W., Cao, J., & Li, K. (2016). Fuzzy group-based intersection
control via vehicular networks for smart transportations. IEEE Transactions on
Industrial Informatics, 13(2), 751-758.
[48] Tsitsiroudi, N., Sarigiannidis, P., Karapistoli, E., & Economides, A. A. (2016).
EyeSim: A mobile application for visual-assisted wormhole attack detection in
IoT-enabled WSNs. In 2016 9th IFIP Wireless and Mobile Networking
Conference (WMNC) (pp. 103-109). IEEE.
[49] Janetzko, H., Stoffel, F., Mittelstädt, S., & Keim, D. A. (2014). Anomaly
detection for visual analytics of power consumption data. Computers & Graphics,
38, 27-37.
[50] Kyriazis, D., Varvarigou, T., White, D., Rossi, A., & Cooper, J. (2013).
Sustainable smart city IoT applications: Heat and electricity management & Eco-
conscious cruise control for public transportation. In 2013 IEEE 14th
International Symposium on" A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia
Networks"(WoWMoM) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
[51] ul Hasan, N., Ejaz, W., Baig, I., Zghaibeh, M., & Anpalagan, A. (2016). QoS-
aware channel assignment for IoT-enabled smart building in 5G systems. In 2016
Eighth International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN)
(pp. 924-928). IEEE.
[52] Tu, C., He, X., Shuai, Z., & Jiang, F. (2017). Big data issues in smart grid–A
review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 79, 1099-1107.
[53] Childs, H., Geveci, B., Schroeder, W., Meredith, J., Moreland, K., Sewell, C., ...
& Bethel, E. W. (2013). Research challenges for visualization software.
Computer, 46(5), 34-42.
[54] Stojkoska, B. L. R., & Trivodaliev, K. V. (2017). A review of Internet of Things
for smart home: Challenges and solutions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140,
1454-1464.
[55] Moreno, M. V., Zamora, M. A., & Skarmeta, A. F. (2015). An IoT based
framework for user–centric smart building services. International Journal of Web
and Grid Services, 11(1), 78-101.
[56] Donalek, C., Djorgovski, S. G., Cioc, A., Wang, A., Zhang, J., Lawler, E., ... &
Davidoff, S. (2014). Immersive and collaborative data visualization using virtual
reality platforms. In 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
(pp. 609-614). IEEE.
[57] Baranwal, T., & Pateriya, P. K. (2016). Development of IoT based smart security
and monitoring devices for agriculture. In 2016 6th International Conference-
Cloud System and Big Data Engineering (Confluence) (pp. 597-602). IEEE.
[58] Brun-Laguna, K., Diedrichs, A. L., Chaar, J. E., Dujovne, D., Taffernaberry, J.
C., Mercado, G., & Watteyne, T. (2016). A demo of the PEACH IoT-based frost
event prediction system for precision agriculture. In 2016 13th Annual IEEE
International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking
(SECON) (pp. 1-3). IEEE.
[59] Perozzi, B., & Akoglu, L. (2018). Discovering communities and anomalies in
attributed graphs: Interactive visual exploration and summarization. ACM
Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 12(2), 1-40.
[60] Luo, Y., Qin, X., Tang, N., & Li, G. (2018). Deepeye: Towards automatic data
visualization. In 2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering
(ICDE) (pp. 101-112). IEEE.
[61] Cao, N., Shi, C., Lin, S., Lu, J., Lin, Y. R., & Lin, C. Y. (2015). Targetvue: Visual
analysis of anomalous user behaviors in online communication systems. IEEE
transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 22(1), 280-289.
[62] Zhou, F., Huang, W., Zhao, Y., Shi, Y., Liang, X., & Fan, X. (2015). ENTVis: A
visual analytic tool for entropy-based network traffic anomaly detection. IEEE
computer graphics and applications, 35(6), 42-50.
[63] Cao, N., Lin, C., Zhu, Q., Lin, Y. R., Teng, X., & Wen, X. (2017). Voila: Visual
anomaly detection and monitoring with streaming spatiotemporal data. IEEE
transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 24(1), 23-33.
[64] Xu, P., Mei, H., Ren, L., & Chen, W. (2016). ViDX: Visual diagnostics of
assembly line performance in smart factories. IEEE transactions on visualization
and computer graphics, 23(1), 291-300.
[65] Yang, L., Ding, C., Wu, M., & Wang, K. (2017). Robust detection of false data
injection attacks for data aggregation in an Internet of Things-based
environmental surveillance. Computer Networks, 129, 410-428.
View publication stats
A. Protopsaltis et al.
[66] Nobre, G. C., & Tavares, E. (2017). Scientific literature analysis on big data and
internet of things applications on circular economy: a bibliometric study.
Scientometrics, 111(1), 463-492.
[67] Bilal, M., Oyedele, L. O., Qadir, J., Munir, K., Ajayi, S. O., Akinade, O. O., ... &
Pasha, M. (2016). Big Data in the construction industry: A review of present
status, opportunities, and future trends. Advanced engineering informatics, 30(3),
500-521.
[68] Armengaud, E., Sams, C., Von Falck, G., List, G., Kreiner, C., & Riel, A. (2017).
Industry 4.0 as digitalization over the entire product lifecycle: Opportunities in
the automotive domain. In European Conference on Software Process
Improvement (pp. 334-351). Springer, Cham.
[69] Thalmann, S., Mangler, J., Schreck, T., Huemer, C., Streit, M., Pauker, F., ... &
Vukovic, M. (2018). Data analytics for industrial process improvement a vision
paper. In 2018 IEEE 20th Conference on Business Informatics (CBI) (Vol. 2, pp.
92-96). IEEE.
[70] Yin, S., & Kaynak, O. (2015). Big data for modern industry: challenges and
trends [point of view]. Proceedings of the IEEE, 103(2), 143-146.
[71] Chandola, V., Banerjee, A., & Kumar, V. (2009). Anomaly detection: A survey.
ACM computing surveys (CSUR), 41(3), 1-58.
[72] Fanaee-T, H., & Gama, J. (2016). Tensor-based anomaly detection: An
interdisciplinary survey. Knowledge-Based Systems, 98, 130-147.
[73] Hodge, V., & Austin, J. (2004). A survey of outlier detection methodologies.
Artificial intelligence review, 22(2), 85-126.
[74] Chae, J., Thom, D., Bosch, H., Jang, Y., Maciejewski, R., Ebert, D. S., & Ertl, T.
(2012). Spatiotemporal social media analytics for abnormal event detection and
examination using seasonal-trend decomposition. In 2012 IEEE Conference on
Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) (pp. 143-152). IEEE.
[75] Liao, Z., Yu, Y., & Chen, B. (2010). Anomaly detection in GPS data based on
visual analytics. In 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and
Technology (pp. 51-58). IEEE.
[76] McKenna, S., Staheli, D., Fulcher, C., & Meyer, M. (2016). Bubblenet: A cyber
security dashboard for visualizing patterns. In Computer Graphics Forum (Vol.
35, No. 3, pp. 281-290).
[77] Thom, D., Bosch, H., Koch, S., Wörner, M., & Ertl, T. (2012). Spatiotemporal
anomaly detection through visual analysis of geolocated twitter messages. In
2012 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (pp. 41-48). IEEE.
[78] Endert, A., Ribarsky, W., Turkay, C., Wong, B. W., Nabney, I., Blanco, I. D., &
Rossi, F. (2017). The state of the art in integrating machine learning into visual
analytics. In Computer Graphics Forum (Vol. 36, No. 8, pp. 458-486).
[79] Batista, A. F., Correa, P. L., & Palanisamy, G. (2016). Visual analytics improving
data understandability in IoT projects: An overview of the US DOE ARM
program data science tools. In 2016 IEEE 13th International Conference on
Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS) (pp. 349-354). IEEE.
[80] Lv, Z., Li, X., Zhang, B., Wang, W., Zhu, Y., Hu, J., & Feng, S. (2016). Managing
big city information based on WebVRGIS. IEEE access, 4, 407-415.
[81] Akoglu, L., Tong, H., & Koutra, D. (2015). Graph based anomaly detection and
description: a survey. Data mining and knowledge discovery, 29(3), 626-688.
[82] Cuffe, P., & Keane, A. (2015). Visualizing the electrical structure of power
systems. IEEE Systems Journal, 11(3), 1810-1821.
[83] Bhattarai, B. P., Paudyal, S., Luo, Y., Mohanpurkar, M., Cheung, K., Tonkoski,
R., ... & Manic, M. (2019). Big data analytics in smart grids: state-of-the-art,
challenges, opportunities, and future directions. IET Smart Grid, 2(2), 141-154.
[84] Munshi, A. A., & Yasser, A. R. M. (2017). Big data framework for analytics in
smart grids. Electric Power Systems Research, 151, 369-380.
[85] Kind, A., Stoecklin, M. P., & Dimitropoulos, X. (2009). Histogram-based traffic
anomaly detection. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management,
6(2), 110-121.
[86] Laskov, P., Rieck, K., Schäfer, C., & Müller, K. R. (2005). Visualization of
anomaly detection using prediction sensitivity. Sicherheit 2005, Sicherheit–
Schutz und Zuverlässigkeit.
[87] Lin, J., Keogh, E., & Lonardi, S. (2005). Visualizing and discovering non-trivial
patterns in large time series databases. Information visualization, 4(2), 61-82.
[88] Nga, D. V., See, O. H., Xuen, C. Y., & Chee, L. L. (2012). Visualization
techniques in smart grid. Smart Grid and Renewable Energy, 3(03), 175.
[89] Saggi, M. K., & Jain, S. (2018). A survey towards an integration of big data
analytics to big insights for value-creation. Information Processing &
Management, 54(5), 758-790.
[90] Ge, M., Bangui, H., & Buhnova, B. (2018). Big data for internet of things: A
survey. Future generation computer systems, 87, 601-614.
[91] Ali, S. M., Gupta, N., Nayak, G. K., & Lenka, R. K. (2016, December). Big data
visualization: Tools and challenges. In 2016 2nd International Conference on
Contemporary Computing and Informatics (IC3I) (pp. 656-660). IEEE.
[92] Marjani, M., Nasaruddin, F., Gani, A., Karim, A., Hashem, I. A. T., Siddiqa, A.,
& Yaqoob, I. (2017). Big IoT data analytics: architecture, opportunities, and open
research challenges. IEEE Access, 5, 5247-5261.
[93] Zheng, Z., Zhu, J., & Lyu, M. R. (2013). Service-generated big data and big data-
as-a-service: an overview. In 2013 IEEE international congress on Big Data (pp.
403-410). IEEE.