You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems

Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25 in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method

Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

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Business Process Innovation using the Process Innovation Laboratory

Most organizations today are required not only to establish effective business processes but they are required to accommodate for changing business conditions at an increasing rate. Many business processes extend beyond the boundary of the enterprise into the supply chain and the information infrastructure therefore is critical. Today nearly every business relies on their Enterprise System (ES) for process integration and the future generations of enterprise systems will increasingly be driven by business process models. Consequently process modeling and improvement will become vital for business process innovation (BPI) in future organizations. There is a significant body of knowledge on various aspect of process innovation, e.g. on conceptual modeling, business processes, supply chains and enterprise systems. Still an overall comprehensive and consistent theoretical framework with guidelines for practical applications has not been identified. The aim of this paper is to establish a conceptual framework for business process innovation in the supply chain based on advanced enterprise systems. The main approach to business process innovation in this context is to create a new methodology for exploring process models and patterns of applications. The paper thus presents a new concept for business process innovation called the process innovation laboratory a.k.a. the Ð-Lab. The Ð-Lab is a comprehensive framework for BPI using advanced enterprise systems. The Ð-Lab is a collaborative workspace for experimenting with process models and an explorative approach to study integrated modeling in a controlled environment. The Ð-Lab facilitates innovation by using an integrated action learning approach to process modeling including contemporary technological, organizational and business perspectivesNo; keywords

Using a Model-driven Approach in Building a Provenance Framework for Tracking Policy-making Processes in Smart Cities

The significance of provenance in various settings has emphasised its potential in the policy-making process for analytics in Smart Cities. At present, there exists no framework that can capture the provenance in a policy-making setting. This research therefore aims at defining a novel framework, namely, the Policy Cycle Provenance (PCP) Framework, to capture the provenance of the policy-making process. However, it is not straightforward to design the provenance framework due to a number of associated policy design challenges. The design challenges revealed the need for an adaptive system for tracking policies therefore a model-driven approach has been considered in designing the PCP framework. Also, suitability of a networking approach is proposed for designing workflows for tracking the policy-making process.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, Proc of the 21st International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2017

The Research Object Suite of Ontologies: Sharing and Exchanging Research Data and Methods on the Open Web

Research in life sciences is increasingly being conducted in a digital and online environment. In particular, life scientists have been pioneers in embracing new computational tools to conduct their investigations. To support the sharing of digital objects produced during such research investigations, we have witnessed in the last few years the emergence of specialized repositories, e.g., DataVerse and FigShare. Such repositories provide users with the means to share and publish datasets that were used or generated in research investigations. While these repositories have proven their usefulness, interpreting and reusing evidence for most research results is a challenging task. Additional contextual descriptions are needed to understand how those results were generated and/or the circumstances under which they were concluded. Because of this, scientists are calling for models that go beyond the publication of datasets to systematically capture the life cycle of scientific investigations and provide a single entry point to access the information about the hypothesis investigated, the datasets used, the experiments carried out, the results of the experiments, the people involved in the research, etc. In this paper we present the Research Object (RO) suite of ontologies, which provide a structured container to encapsulate research data and methods along with essential metadata descriptions. Research Objects are portable units that enable the sharing, preservation, interpretation and reuse of research investigation results. The ontologies we present have been designed in the light of requirements that we gathered from life scientists. They have been built upon existing popular vocabularies to facilitate interoperability. Furthermore, we have developed tools to support the creation and sharing of Research Objects, thereby promoting and facilitating their adoption.Comment: 20 page

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure