Evaluating Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics For Use in Software Visualisation

3D web software visualisation has always been expensive, special purpose, and hard to program. Most of the technologies used require large amounts of scripting, are not reliable on all platforms, are binary formats, or no longer maintained. We can make end-user web software visualisation of object-oriented programs cheap, portable, and easy by using Extensible (X3D) 3D Graphics, which is a new open standard. In this thesis we outline our experience with X3D and discuss the suitability of X3D as an output format for software visualisation

Making Data Accessible: An Overview of Interactive Data Visualization Using D3.js as Applied to a Scientific Dataset : Making a Static Visualization Interactive

Technology is moving at a very fast pace, but data is still represented as tables, static graphs and infographics that do not create an impact on the population at large. Excluding the scientific and educational communities, to the common individual information should be displayed in an entertaining manner. This project set out to fulfill this goal by using known technologies from D3js, design guidelines, CSS3 animations, and HTML5 elements to real scientific data from the United States National Climate Data Center. The final product is a one page web application displaying 3,000,000 years of global temperatures in a visual format. The data was plotted using D3js, made interactive with JavaScript and laid out using Twitter Bootstrap. What can be concluded is that it is possible to create interactive content with current technologies, but the process is still only achievable after extensive study of the technologies involved. Further development has to be made for data interactive tools to become easier to use and to produce large-scale interactive web applications involving data display and analysis. The advancement of interactive visualizations are also relevant as studies have shown that engaging lectures lead to a statistically significant higher average on unit exams compared with traditional didactic lectures. This could be hypothesized to be the same for interactive data and this was confirmed by a small questionnaire

Facilitating algorithm visualization creation and adoption in education

The research question of this thesis is: How can we develop algorithm animations (AA) and AA systems further to better facilitate the creation and adoption of AA in education? The motivation for tackling this issue is that algorithm animation has not been widely used in teaching computer science. One of the main reasons for not taking full advantage of AA in teaching is the lack of time on behalf of the instructors. Furthermore, there is a shortage of ready-made, good quality algorithm visualizations. The main contributions are as follows: Effortless Creation of Algorithm Animation. We define a Taxonomy of Effortless Creation of Algorithm Animations. In addition, we introduce a new approach for teachers to create animations by allowing effortless on-the-fly creation of algorithm animations by applying visual algorithm simulation through a simple user interface. Proposed Standard for Algorithm Animation language. We define a Taxonomy of Algorithm Animation Languages to help comparing the different AA languages. The taxonomy and work by an international working group is used to define a new algorithm animation language, eXtensible Algorithm Animation Language, XAAL. Applications of XAAL in education. We provide two different processing approaches for using and producing XAAL animations with existing algorithm animation systems. In addition, we have a framework aiding in this integration as well as prototype implementations of the processes. Furthermore, we provide a novel solution to the problem of seamlessly integrating algorithm animations with hypertext. In our approach, the algorithm animation viewer is implemented purely with JavaScript and HTML. Finally, we introduce a processing model to easily produce lecture slides for a common presentation tool of XAAL animations

Top tools for Data Visualisation in web development : a performance first approach

The purpose of this final year project was to deliver a visualisation based solution for the game analytics company, Game Refinery. The company’s platform presents a handful of reviews for games based on features with an additional chart that shows the rank of games in stores. Due to the slowness of the charts on the platform, multiple types of performance testing mechanisms were implemented to optimize the charts and the ways the system runs them. The focal point of the thesis is testing the performance of different charting libraries based on their user friendliness, features, functionalities, customisability, architecture, scalability, compatibility and performance. The project also put emphasis on performance optimization in web development and proper implementation of data visualization in web applications

On porting software visualization tools to the web

Software systems are hard to understand due to the complexity and the sheer size of the data to be analyzed. Software visualization tools are a great help as they can sum up large quantities of data in dense, meaningful pictures. Traditionally, such tools come in the form of desktop applications. Modern web frameworks are about to change this status quo, as building software visualization tools as web applications can help in making them available to a larger audience in a collaborative setting. Such a migration comes with a number of promises, perils, and technical implications that must be considered before starting any migration process. In this paper, we share our experiences in porting two such tools to the web and provide guidelines about the porting. In particular, we discuss promises and perils that go hand in hand with such an endeavor and present a number of technological alternatives that are available to implement web-based visualization

Chapter 1 An eTextBook in Computational Physics with Multiple Executable Elements

Abstract A complete eTextBook with multiple executable elements has been created, and Web-based versions have been placed in repositories affiliated with the US National Science Digital Library. The book, which is aimed at upper-division undergraduates, contains files format and executable elements chosen to be platform independent, highly useable and free. While future technologies and operating systems promise vastly improved executable books, the created eTextbook highlights some of the features possible with existing technologies. The project combines some 20 years of Computational Physics textbook developments and 15 years of Web enhancement developments into a prototype eTextBook that includes text, computational laboratories, demonstrations and video-based lecture modules

Dash Sylvereye:A Python Library for Dashboard-Driven Visualization of Large Street Networks

State-of-the-art open graph visualization tools like Gephi, KeyLines, and Cytoscape are not suitable for studying street networks with thousands of roads since they do not support simultaneously polylines for edges, navigable maps, GPU-accelerated rendering, interactivity, and the means for visualizing multivariate data. To fill this gap, we present Dash Sylvereye: a new Python library to produce interactive visualizations of primal street networks on top of tiled web maps. Thanks to its integration with the Dash framework, Dash Sylvereye can be used to develop web dashboards around temporal and multivariate street data. This is achieved by coordinating the various elements of a Dash Sylvereye visualization with other plotting and UI components provided by Dash. Additionally, Dash Sylvereye provides convenient functions to easily import OpenStreetMap street topologies obtained with the OSMnx library. Moreover, Dash Sylvereye uses WebGL for GPU-accelerated rendering when redrawing the road network. We conduct experiments to assess the performance of Dash Sylvereye on a commodity computer when exploiting software acceleration in terms of frames per second, CPU time, and frame duration. We show that Dash Sylvereye can offer fast panning speeds, close to 60 FPS, and CPU times below 20 ms, for street networks with thousands of edges, and above 24 FPS, and CPU times below 40 ms, for networks with dozens of thousands of edges. Additionally, we conduct a performance comparison against two state-of-the-art street visualization tools. We found Dash Sylvereye to be competitive when compared to the state-of-the-art visualization libraries Kepler.gl and city-roads. Finally, we describe a web dashboard application that exploits Dash Sylvereye for the analysis of a SUMO vehicle traffic simulation

User-centric Visualization of Data Provenance

The need to understand and track files (and inherently, data) in cloud computing systems is in high demand. Over the past years, the use of logs and data representation using graphs have become the main method for tracking and relating information to the cloud users. While it is still in use, tracking and relating information with ‘Data Provenance’ (i.e. series of chronicles and the derivation history of data on meta-data) is the new trend for cloud users. However, there is still much room for improving representation of data activities in cloud systems for end-users. In this thesis, we propose “UVisP (User-centric Visualization of Data Provenance with Gestalt)”, a novel user-centric visualization technique for data provenance. This technique aims to facilitate the missing link between data movements in cloud computing environments and the end-users’ uncertain queries over their files’ security and life cycle within cloud systems. The proof of concept for the UVisP technique integrates D3 (an open-source visualization API) with Gestalts’ theory of perception to provide a range of user-centric visualizations. UVisP allows users to transform and visualize provenance (logs) with implicit prior knowledge of ‘Gestalts’ theory of perception.’ We presented the initial development of the UVisP technique and our results show that the integration of Gestalt and the existence of ‘perceptual key(s)’ in provenance visualization allows end-users to enhance their visualizing capabilities, extract useful knowledge and understand the visualizations better. This technique also enables end-users to develop certain methods and preferences when sighting different visualizations. For example, having the prior knowledge of Gestalt’s theory of perception and integrated with the types of visualizations offers the user-centric experience when using different visualizations. We also present significant future work that will help profile new user-centric visualizations for cloud users

VisualBib: A novel Web app for supporting researchers in the creation, visualization and sharing of bibliographies

In this paper, we present VisualBib, a Web application, which allows users to create, visualize, modify, explore, and share bibliographies and the related citation networks, using innovative diagrams, called narrative views. The metadata are retrieved in real-time from four existing bibliographic indexes, Scopus, OpenCitations, and CrossRef/Orcid. Bibliographies and views are formally described and modeled using zz-structures, a semantic, not-hierarchical data model. VisualBib has been evaluated through two evaluation studies, one focused on the quantitative side and another on the qualitative side. Taking into account both studies, they evaluate the tool regarding the effectiveness performing tasks, usability, graphic layout and other questions specific to the VisualBib features. The evaluation throws positive significant results in all areas when compared to Scopus searching features

Geovisualization Using HTML5 : a case study to improve animations of historical geographic data

Popular science Visualize geographic data Using HTML5 The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) has been assembled by the Centre for Economic Demography (CED), Lund University. It contains demographic and economic information of Scania from the 17th century until the present. The SEDD database has been integrated with geographic data, which are digitized from four independent historical maps. To help the users well understand these data, a web mapping application called SEDD Map has been developed and tested. The previous version of SEDD Map is constructed using Silverlight plugin. It cannot run on most popular portable devices. As Hypertext Markup Languages (HTML) continue to develop, a recent version, HTML5, was published in 2012. It aims to support the latest multimedia formats and reduce the need for plugins. So, to improve the compatibility of SEDD Map, this work using HTML5 to developed a new version of SEDD Map. Before we constructed the new version of SEDD Map, a set of web mapping applications and programs were evaluated. From this evaluation and comparison, we found that SEDD Map could be improved in many area, such as improving the animation of historical geographic data. Animation is a useful tool when presenting historical data. The geographic data in SEDD Map are taken from four independent historical maps. To visualize geographic data as an animation, we need to create a time sense sequential dataset. In this study, we used linear interpolation and the four historical maps as start years and end years to simulate 159 maps to visualize the geographic data as animations. From this study, we found that: The commonly used web mapping applications for investigating demographic data contain functions, such as interactive visualization, statistical graphics, basic map tools, animations, etc; HTML5 can replace (and improve) the used of Silverlight for web mapping; Animations can be generated (filling in what is missing is to improve the data sets).The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) has been assembled by the Centre for Economic Demography (CED), Lund University. It contains information about the demographic and economic conditions of people that have lived in 5 parishes in Scania from the 17th century until the present. The SEDD database has been integrated with geographic data, which are digitized from four independent historical maps. To visualize and analyze these data, a GIS based web mapping application called SEDD Map has been developed and tested. The previous version of SEDD Map is constructed using Silverlight. As a result, it only can be used on computers which have installed the Silverlight plugin. As Hypertext Markup Languages (HTML) continue to develop, a recent version, HTML5, was published in 2012. It aims to support the latest multimedia formats and reduce the need for plugins. In this study, we use HTML5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3), JavaScript and the ArcGIS API for JavaScript to create a new version of SEDD Map to visualize data stored in the SEDD database. Before we constructed the new version of SEDD Map, a set of web mapping applications and programs were evaluated by the requirements which were needed to create the new version of SEDD Map. From this evaluation and comparison, we found that SEDD Map could be improved in many area, such as improving the animation of historical geographic data. Animation is a useful tool when presenting historical data. The geographic data in SEDD Map are taken from four independent historical maps. To visualize geographic data as an animation, we need to create a time sense sequential dataset, which is done in a parallel project. In this study, we evaluate techniques for data animation. We used linear interpolation and the four historical maps as start years and end years to simulate 159 maps to visualize the geographic data as animations. The conclusions are as follows: 1) The commonly used web mapping applications for investigating demographic data contain functions, such as interactive visualization, statistical graphics, basic map tools, animations, etc. 2) HTML5 can replace (and improve) the used of Silverlight for web mapping. 3) Animations can be generated (filling in what is missing is to improve the data sets)