Annotating bi visualization dashboards: Needs & challenges

Annotations have been identified as an important aid in anal-ysis record-keeping and recently data discovery. In this pa-per we discuss the use of annotations on visualization dash-boards, with a special focus on business intelligence (BI) anal-ysis. In-depth interviews with experts lead to new annota-tion needs for multi-chart visualization systems, on which we based the design of a dashboard prototype that supports data and context aware annotations. We focus particularly on novel annotation aspects, such as multi-target annotations, annotation transparency across charts and data dimension lev-els, as well as annotation properties such as lifetime and va-lidity. Moreover, our prototype is built on a data layer shared among different data-sources and BI applications, allowing cross application annotations. We discuss challenges in sup-porting context aware annotations in dashboards and other vi-sualizations, such as dealing with changing annotated data, and provide design solutions. Finally we report reactions and recommendations from a different set of expert users