2.4 Discussion

The calendar-based visualization provides data plots in the familiar format of an everyday tool. Patterns relating to special events and public holidays for the region are more visible to the viewer.

The calendar layout will be useful for studying consumer trends and human behavior. It will be less useful for physical processes such as weather. The layout does not replace traditional displays, but serves to complement them to further tease out structure in temporal data. Analysts would still be advised to plot overall summaries and deviations in order to study general trends.

The methodology creates the western calendar layout, because most countries have adopted this format. The main difference between countries is the use of different languages for labeling, which is supported by the software. Formats beyond the western calendar, or six-weeks and tetris-like layouts could be achieved by slightly tweaking the modular arithmetic approach. These features will be added as new options in the future.