Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-07951-0 Visualization of (multimedia) dependencies from big data Loredana Caruccio 1 · Vincenzo Deufemia 1 · Giuseppe Polese 1 Received: 12 December 2018 / Revised: 14 June 2019 / Accepted: 4 July 2019 / © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Data dependencies represent one of the key metadata to characterize and profile multimedia and big data sources. With respect to traditional databases, in these new contexts it has been necessary to introduce some approximations in the definition of dependencies. This yields a proliferation of dependencies, which makes it difficult for a user to effectively analyze them. To this end, in this paper we present a technique for ranking and visualizing dependencies holding on big and multimedia data. A qualitative evaluation has highlighted the advantages of the proposed visualization metaphors. Keywords Knowledge visualization · Visual analytics · Relaxed functional dependencies · Multimedia data · Visual metaphors 1 Introduction The evolution from traditional to complex (e.g., multimedia, geographical, and fuzzy) data, and successively to big data, has raised the necessity to devise methods and tools to automat- ically extract and visualize insights from them. Insights include classifications, association rules, and several types of metadata [2], such as value patterns, foreign keys, and data depen- dencies, such as multivalued, inclusion, and functional dependencies (FDs) [5]. The latter were mainly used in traditional alphanumeric databases for normalization purposes, and were specified at design time. Successively, with the evolution of database technologies, new types of FDs have been defined, like for instance fuzzy functional dependencies [40], and multimedia dependencies [12], which introduced some approximations made necessary  Loredana Caruccio lcaruccio@unisa.it Vincenzo Deufemia deufemia@unisa.it Giuseppe Polese gpolese@unisa.it 1 University of Salerno, via Giovanni Paolo II n. 132, 84084, Fisciano, SA Italy