TY - JOUR
T1 - VisMashup
T2 - Streamlining the creation of custom visualization applications
AU - Santos, Emanuele
AU - Lins, Lauro
AU - Ahrens, James P.
AU - Freire, Juliana
AU - Silva, Cláudio T.
N1 - Funding Information:
Before having access to VISMASHUP, the expert responsible for creating the multi-modal visualizations needed in this study had designed had a single pipeline consisting of several disjoint sub-pipelines. Each of these sub-pipelines handled a single data modality or processing technique. But for medleys to be effective, it is im- portant that the pipelines are modularized. Since medleys are composed by distinct pipeline views, a medley consisting of composite pipelines is inherently difficult to manipulate. By enforcing stricter modularization on the development of pipelines, medley-enabled systems can benefit not only from more concise pipeline descriptions, but from more flexible display of the results. 6 CONCLUSION We have described VISMASHUP, a new framework that simplifies the creation of custom visualization applications. Using VISMASHUP, an application developer can quickly assemble custom applications by leveraging an existing collection of visualization pipelines and their provenance. The mashups produced by VISMASHUP are not a substitute for more comprehensive, domain-specific applications such as CDAT. Instead, our target are simpler, exploratory applications. Although VISMASHUP simplifies the development of one-of-a-kind, domain-specific visualization applications, it has some limitations. The integration of different libraries can sometimes be complicated by a number of practical issues, such as compatibility of underlying interface toolkit (e.g., Tk vs Qt). Also, while we try to make sensible choices on the automatic layout of the interface, and we allow the users to fine tune it, this does not guarantee that the most appropriate and intuitive interface for the task at hand is created. There are several areas of future work that we would like to pursue. First and foremost, we need to perform a more detailed evaluation of the effectiveness and usability of VISMASHUP. To do so, we will carry out user studies. To provide more flexibility in filtering and selecting relevant pipelines, we plan to integrate more sophisticated interfaces that allows structural queries to be specified by example [2, 24]. We also plan to explore alternative techniques for mining the pipeline collection. For example, it can be useful to support different grouping/clustering strategies [23]. Last, but not least, we would like to investigate environments where users can share and collaboratively develop applications. Such environments have been successfully deployed for Web mashups (see e.g., http://www.programmableweb.com). But we believe that the ability to share visualization applications, in addition to data, will help advance existing efforts on collaborative data analysis [33] and it also has the potential to broaden the use of visualization techniques. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank Joel Tohline for the astrophysics, and Erik Anderson and Gil Preston for the neuroscience case study. We thank the Vis-Trails team members for their help with this work. Our research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (grants IIS-0905385, IIS-0746500, ATM-0835821, IIS-0844546, CNS-0751152, IIS-0713637, OCE-0424602, IIS-0534628, CNS-0514485, IIS-0513692, CNS-0524096, CCF-0401498, OISE-0405402, CCF-0528201, CNS-0551724), the Department of Energy SciDAC (VACET and SDM centers), and IBM Faculty Awards (2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008). E. Santos is partially supported by a CAPES/Fulbright fellowship.
PY - 2009/11
Y1 - 2009/11
N2 - Visualization is essential for understanding the increasing volumes of digital data. However, the process required to create insightful visualizations is involved and time consuming. Although several visualization tools are available, including tools with sophisticated visual interfaces, they are out of reach for users who have little or no knowledge of visualization techniques and/or who do not have programming expertise. In this paper, we propose VISMASHUP, a new framework for streamlining the creation of customized visualization applications. Because these applications can be customized for very specific tasks, they can hide much of the complexity in a visualization specification and make it easier for users to explore visualizations by manipulating a small set of parameters. We describe the framework and how it supports the various tasks a designer needs to carry out to develop an application, from mining and exploring a set of visualization specifications (pipelines), to the creation of simplified views of the pipelines, and the automatic generation of the application and its interface. We also describe the implementation of the system and demonstrate its use in two real application scenarios.
AB - Visualization is essential for understanding the increasing volumes of digital data. However, the process required to create insightful visualizations is involved and time consuming. Although several visualization tools are available, including tools with sophisticated visual interfaces, they are out of reach for users who have little or no knowledge of visualization techniques and/or who do not have programming expertise. In this paper, we propose VISMASHUP, a new framework for streamlining the creation of customized visualization applications. Because these applications can be customized for very specific tasks, they can hide much of the complexity in a visualization specification and make it easier for users to explore visualizations by manipulating a small set of parameters. We describe the framework and how it supports the various tasks a designer needs to carry out to develop an application, from mining and exploring a set of visualization specifications (pipelines), to the creation of simplified views of the pipelines, and the automatic generation of the application and its interface. We also describe the implementation of the system and demonstrate its use in two real application scenarios.
KW - Dataflow
KW - Scientific Visualization
KW - Visualization Systems
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=70350637824&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1109/TVCG.2009.195
DO - 10.1109/TVCG.2009.195
M3 - Article
C2 - 19834231
AN - SCOPUS:70350637824
SN - 1077-2626
VL - 15
SP - 1539
EP - 1546
JO - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IS - 6
M1 - 5290771
ER -