Querying and creating visualizations by analogy

Journal ArticleWhile there have been advances in visualization systems, particularly in multi-view visualizations and visual exploration, the process of building visualizations remains a major bottleneck in data exploration. We show that provenance metadata collected during the creation of pipelines can be reused to suggest similar content in related visualizations and guide semi-automated changes. We introduce the idea of query-by-example in the context of an ensemble of visualizations, and the use of analogies as first-class operations in a system to guide scalable interactions. We describe an implementation of these techniques in VisTrails, a publicly-available, open-source system

Towards enabling social analysis of scientific data

Journal ArticleFlickr, Facebook, Yahoo! Pipes), which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users, are becoming increasingly popular. An important benefit of these sites is that they enable users to leverage the wisdom of the crowds. For example, in Flickr, users, in a mass collaboration approach, tag large volumes of pictures. These tags, in turn, help them to more easily find pictures they are looking for. In the (very) recent past, a new class of Web site has emerged that enables users to upload and collectively analyze many types of data (e.g., Many Eyes and Swivel). These are part of a broad phenomenon that has been called social data analysis". This trend is expanding to the scientific domain where a number of collaboratories are under development. As the cost of hardware decreases over time, the cost of people goes up as analyses get more involved, larger groups need to collaborate, and the volume of data manipulated increases. Science collaboratories aim to bridge this gap by allowing scientists to share, re-use and refine their computational tasks (workflows). In this position paper, we discuss the challenges and key components that are needed to enable the development of effective social data analysis (SDA) sites for the scientific domain

Seeing the Unseeable

The SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET) isa highly productive effort combining the forces of leading visualization researchersfrom five different institutions to solve some of the most challenging dataunderstanding problems in modern science. The VACET technology portfolio isdiverse, spanning all typical visual data analysis use models and effectivelybalancing forward-looking research with focused software architecture andengineering resulting in a production-quality software infrastructure. One of the keyelements in VACET's success is a rich set of projects that are collaborations withscience stakeholders: these efforts focus on identifying and overcoming obstacles toscientific knowledge discovery in modern, large, and complex scientific datasets

Provenance for visualizations: reproducibility and beyond

Journal ArticleThe demand for the construction of complex visualizations is growing in many disciplines of science, as users are faced with ever increasing volumes of data to analyze. The authors present VisTrails, an open source provenance-management system that provides infrastructure for data exploration and visualization

End-to-end eScience: integrating workflow, query, visualization, and provenance at an ocean observatory

Journal ArticleData analysis tasks at an Ocean Observatory require integrative and and domain-specialized use of database, workflow, visualization systems. We describe a platform to support these tasks developed as part of the cyberinfrastructure at the NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction integrating a provenance-aware workflow system, 3D visualization, and a remote query engine for large-scale ocean circulation models. We show how these disparate tools complement each other and give examples of real scientific insights delivered by the integrated system. We conclude that data management solutions for eScience require this kind of holistic, integrative approach, explain how our approach may be generalized, and recommend a broader, application-oriented research agenda to explore relevant architectures

Towards a Flexible User-Centred Visual Presentation Approach

Leveraging the power of flexible visual presentations has become an effective way to aid information interpretation, decision making and problem solving. It is indispensable to address the high complexities with visualization problems and relieve the impact from the intrinsic limitations of human cognitive capacity. Addressing these problems raises demanding requirements for information presentation flexibility. However, many existing visualization systems tend to provide weak support for such flexibility due to the issue of closely coupled information representation and presentation in system designs. This issue limits their support for rich presentation options, flexible presentation integration and reusability, and vivid storytelling of data. To help with addressing these problems, issues and requirements, this paper generalizes typical presentation models to provide paradigm level support for achieving presentation flexibility, and identifies key requirements for presentation development to accomplish the flexibility at a system level. With articulating the requirements at both paradigm and system levels, the paper proposes a user-centred process to realize presentation flexibility by meeting both functional and cognitive requirements for information presentation. The proposed theory is validated against a real-world business case and applied to guide the development of a prototypical system, which is demonstrated through a sequence of scenario-driven illustrations