Situvis: A sensor data analysis and abstraction tool for pervasive computing systems

Pervasive systems are large-scale systems consisting of many sensors capturing numerous types of information. As this data is highly voluminous and dimensional, data analysis tasks can be extremely cumbersome and time-consuming. Enabling computers to recognise real-world situations is an even more difficult problem, involving not only data analysis, but also consistency checking. Here we present Situvis, an interactive visualisation tool for representing sensor data and creating higher-level abstractions from the data. This paper builds on previous work, Clear et al. (2009) [8] through evolved tool functionality and an evaluation of Situvis. A user-trial consisting of 10 participants shows that Situvis can be used to complete the key tasks in the development process of situation specifications in over 50% less time than an improvised alternative toolset. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.