ABSTRACT
Analysis of data sets that may be changing often or in real-time, consists of at least three important synchronized components: i) figuring out what to infer (objectives), ii) analysis or computation of those objectives, and iii) understanding of the results which may require drill-down and/or visualization. There is considerable research on the first two of the above components whereas understanding actionable inferences through visualization has not been addressed properly. Visualization is an important step towards both understanding (especially by non-experts) and inferring the actions that need to be taken. As an example, for Covid-19, knowing regions (say, at the county or state level) that have seen a spike or are prone to a spike in the near future may warrant additional actions with respect to gatherings, business opening hours, etc. This paper focuses on a modular and extensible architecture for visualization of base as well as analyzed data. This paper proposes a modular architecture of a dashboard for user interaction, visualization management, and support for complex analysis of base data. The contributions of this paper are: i) extensibility of the architecture providing flexibility to add additional analysis, visualizations, and user interactions without changing the workflow, ii) decoupling of the functional modules to ease and speed up development by different groups, and iii) supporting concurrent users and addressing efficiency issues for display response time. This paper uses Multilayer Networks (or MLNs) for analysis. To showcase the above, we present the architecture of a visualization dashboard, termed CoWiz++ (for Covid Wizard), and elaborate on how web-based user interaction and display components are interfaced seamlessly with the back-end modules. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.