Techniques and Tools of Data Visualization in Mobile Cloud Environment—A Survey

According to the World Economic Forum, the world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and 90% of all data has been created in the last two years (Stokes in Research Information 112:10–12, 2022). Data is the new oil of the twenty-first century. It has the power to accelerate the information economy. The significance of data can be expressed through data visualization. Data visualization is a graphical representation that reveals insights and patterns that are not immediately noticeable in the raw data. Visualization is the “front end” of the data analytics pipeline. It offers compact graphical presentations and user interfaces. Visualization facilitates interactive manipulation of massive information items extracted from far larger datasets. It allows the user to gain understanding of the data and come up with new hypotheses. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of data visualization's significance, techniques, and tools in the mobile cloud environment. Data characteristics, such as data size, data type, and feature composition, play an important role in effective data visualization. The study establishes guidelines to select appropriate data visualization techniques based on data characteristics. This paper aims to serve as a reference point to choose apt data visualization techniques and tools for researchers, decision-makers, as well as application developers.