StreamFlow : a visual analysis system for 2D streamlines based on workflow mining technique

Streamline is often employed to visualize the flow field as it is related to the underlying characteristic of the field. However, existing approaches lack focuses on capturing the global motion pattern and dominant features of the flow field. The correspondence between the selected geometry feature of streamline and the underlying feature of the flow field cannot be defined precisely. In this paper, we present a novel feature extraction and analysis approach by introducing workflow mining techniques. In our approach, we define the basic actions of the streamlines which formulate the activity space and model each streamline as a sequence of activities. The workflow model based on streamline is then extracted graphically, from which the global motion pattern and dominant features can be explored. The precise features can be extracted in a more intuitive and understandable way according to the associated motion patterns from the model graph. Besides, we build a visual analysis system called StreamFlow to support visualization, exploration, and analysis of the flow field with our proposed workflow mining-based method. We conduct two case studies to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Graphic abstract