An Extended Platter Metaphor for Effective Reconfigurable Network Visualization

We adapt the Flodar [6] metaphor to visualize dynamic networks and present experimental results on the effectiveness of this approach. Dynamic reconfiguration of networks enable rapid optimization of per¬formance of a network, however, it poses several management difficulties when user intervention is required to resolve complex routing problems. Our metaphor scales well for networks of varying size, addresses the cluttering problem seen in past metaphors and maintains the overall network context while providing additional support for navigation and interaction. We apply the metaphor to three dynamic reconfiguration management tasks and show how these tasks are visually represented with our approach. We conducted an experiment with network administrators and researchers as subjects. A good understanding of network conditions portrayed in the metaphor was achieved within a short period

Analysis of KFUPM Web Traffic Using Proxy Access Logs

In this paper, we study the web traffic of KFUPM campus network using one month long access logs captured from a proxy cache at the edge of this network. This network is constrained by limited wide-area networking infrastructure in terms of low bandwidth and high delay. A cluster of proxy servers at the edge of this network is used to alleviate the problems due to limited outgoing bandwidth. Our study reveals that the WWW traffic characteristics generally follow well-known heavy tailed distributions with only a couple of exceptions. Our analysis also indicates that majority of traffic is destined to remote locations, resulting in excessive latency

Real-Time Geographic Visualization of World Wide Web Traffic

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is well documented, with WWW sites now advertised in magazines, newspapers, and television commercials. Given current use of the WWW for scientific and educational information sharing and its emerging use for electronic commerce, studying access patterns is an important first step in understanding network implications and in designing future generations of WWW servers that can accommodate new media types and interaction modes. Due in large part to early development of the Mosaic WWW browser by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the access load on the NCSA WWW server remains extremely high. Using the NCSA WWW server as a high load testbed, we describe Avatar, a virtual reality system for real-time analysis and mapping of WWW server accesses to their point of geographic origin on various projections of the Earth. As HTTP protocols expand to demographic data, the Avatar architecture can be extended to correlate this da..

Web-based visualisation techniques for reporting zoonotic outbreaks

Zoonotic diseases are diseases that are transmitted from animals or vectors to humans and vice versa. The public together with veterinarian authorities should readily access disease information as it is vital in rapidly controlling resultant zoonotic outbreak threats through improved awareness. Currently, the reporting of disease information in South Africa is predominantly limited to traditional methods of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) like faxes, monthly newspaper reports, radios, phones and televisions. Although these are effective ways of communication, their disadvantage is that the information that most of them offer can only be accessed at specific times during a crisis. New technologies like the internet have become the most efficient way of distributing information in near-real-time. Many developed countries have used web-based reporting platforms to deliver timely information through temporal and geographic visualisation techniques. There has been an attempt in the use of web-based reporting in South Africa but most of these sites are characterised by heavy text which makes them time consuming to use or maintain. As a result most sites have not been updated or have ceased to exist because of the work load involved. The success of web reporting mechanisms in developed countries offers evidence that web-based reporting systems when appropriately visualised can improve the easy understanding of information and efficiency in the analysis of that data. In this thesis, a web-based reporting prototype was proposed after gathering information from different sources: literature related to disease reporting and the visualisation of infectious diseases; the exploration of the currently deployed web systems; and the investigation of user requirements from relevant parties. The proposed prototype system was then developed using Adobe Flash tools, Java and MySQL languages. A focus group then reviewed the developed system to ascertain that the relevant requirements had been incorporated and to obtain additional ideas about the system. This led to the proposal of a new prototype system that can be used by the authorities concerned as a plan to develop a fully functional disease reporting system for South Africa

Enhancing comprehension of complex data visualizations: Framework and techniques based on signature exploration

This thesis presents a framework and set of readily applicable techniques for enhancing comprehension of complex data visualizations. Central to the work has been the definition and exploration of a new concept, signature exploration. Visualization is being used increasingly to help make sense of large sets of data and information. Abstractions of complex data can be performed to reduce the dimensions to 2 or 3 for display. Novel or established representations can be used that allow direct mapping of greater numbers of attributes, and of a variety of data structures. There is an ever expanding set of visualization tools available. Two questions face the user: how to choose appropriate displays and how to understand the resultant graphic. This thesis examines how to support the user’s comprehension in this context. The work makes the following three main contributions to enhancing comprehension of complex data visualizations: the definition and application of signature exploration, a concept describing the exploration of visualization behaviour using specially constructed data; the proposal of a framework for the design of visualization systems for increased comprehension; the introduction of two new forms of interaction - which are here described as visual data tracking and feature fingerprinting. The central theme for the exploration presented in this work is the notion that a user wants to take data that is known in some way, put this into the visualization process and assess the resultant visual depiction. This intuitive desire has been captured in the definition of the concept, signature exploration. Signature exploration describes the exploration of the behaviour of visual representations using specially constructed datasets that contain features of interest. The datasets are used to explore the signatures of different visual representations and mathematical transformations. The thesis defines and illustrates signature exploration, with five proposed approaches: generic dataset provision; user-construction of data; querying; insertion of landmarks; elicitation and application of feedback data. These applications of signature exploration, together with analysis of the comprehension challenges presented by different aspects of visualization, and established work to support user comprehension, form the basis of the framework for increased user comprehension. Example software has been developed within the context of a visualization application that employs a number of visualization algorithms to generate graphics for multivariate or proximity data. Principal Components Analysis, Principal Coordinates Analysis and distance metrics of various kinds are the algorithms used. An additional interface is given to the user, to perform signature exploration. The work has resulted in the specification of a set of techniques that developers can readily apply. Two new interaction forms are described: visual data tracking - bi-directional brushing and linking between representations also allowing change of position or value; feature fingerprinting - synthetic additions to real-world datasets to provide the user with calibration of the visual depiction

The view from the Chathams: geovisualisation of web site hits using Google Earth™

A useful approach to visualising the geographical distribution of web site hits is to geolocate the IP addresses of hits and plot them on a world map. In this paper we examine the efficacy of Google Earth for this purpose.PublishedNon Peer ReviewedBeaumont, J. R. (1991). “GIS and market analysis” In D. J. Maguire, M. F. Goodkind & D. W. Rhind (eds), Geographical Information Systems, Volume 2: Applications. Longman. Harlow, UK pp. 139–151. CIA (2006). “The World Factbook” Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, USA. *https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ Cruz-Neira, C., Sandin, D. J., DeFanti, T. A., Kenyon, R. V. & Hart, J. C. (1992). “The CAVE: Audio visual experience automatic virtual environment” Communications of the ACM. 35(6): 64–72. de Paor, D. G. (2006). “Towards a single, planet-wide, scale-independent, multidimensional geological map” 2006 GSA Annual Meeting and Exposition. Geological Society of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (In press). Dodge, M. & Kitchin, R. (2001). Mapping Cyberspace. Routledge. London, UK. Jiang, B. & Ormeling, F. (2000). “Mapping cyberspace: Visualizing, analysing and exploring virtual worlds” The Cartographic Journal. 37(2): 117–122. Lamm, S. E., Reed, D. A. & Scullin, W. H. (1996). “Real-time geographic visualization of World Wide Web traffic” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 28(7–11): 1457–1468. MacEachren, A. M. (1998). “Cartography, GIS and the World Wide Web” Progress in Human Geography. 22(4): 575–585. Maxmind (2006). “GeoLite City: Free IP address to city database” Maxmind LLC. Accessed on 22 September 2006. *http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity Papadakakis, N., Markatos, E. P. & Papathanasiou, A. E. (1998). “Palantir: A visualization tool for the World Wide Web” Proceedings of the INET’98 Conference. Geneva, Switzerland. *http://www.isoc.org/inet98/proceedings/1e/1e 1.htm Sale, A. & McGee, C. (2006). “Tasmania Statistics Software” University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Accessed on 23 September 2006. *http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000262/ Stanger, N. & McGregor, G. (2006). “Hitting the ground running: Building New Zealand’s first publicly available institutional repository” Discussion Paper 2006/07. Department of Information Science, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. *http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/274/ Thompson, K., Keith, J., Swan, R. H. & Hamblin, W. K. (2006). “Linking geoscience visualization tools: Google Earth, oblique aerial panoramas, and illustration and mapping software” 2006 GSA Annual Meeting and Exposition. Geological Society of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (In press). USGS (2006). “Google Earth applications” Integrated Remote Sensing and Modeling Group, United States Geological Survey Center for Coastal & Watershed Studies, Tampa, Florida, USA. Accessed on 22 September 2006. *http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/remote-sensing/advancedmethods/googleearth.html Wood, J., Brodlie, K. & Wright, H. (1996). “Visualization over the World Wide Web and its application to environmental data” In R. Yagel & G. M. Nielson (eds), Proceedings of IEEE Visualization ’96. IEEE Computer Society and ACM, San Francisco, California pp. 81–86

Scalability of techniques for online geographic visualization of Web site hits

Extremely large data sets are now commonplace, and they are often visualized through the World Wide Web. Scalability of web-based visualization techniques is thus a key issue. This paper investigates the scalability of four representative techniques for dynamic map generation and display (e.g., for visualizing geographic sources of web site hits): generating a single composite map image, overlaying images on an underlying base map and two variants of overlaying HTML on a base map. These four techniques embody a mixture of different display technologies and distribution styles (three server-side and one distributed across both client and server). Each technique was applied to 20 synthetic data sets of increasing size, and the data set volume, elapsed time and memory consumption were measured. The results show that all four techniques are suitable for small data sets comprising a few thousand points, but that the two HTML techniques scale to larger data sets very poorly across all three variables.PublishedPeer ReviewedAndrienko G, Andrienko N, Dykes J, Mountain D, Noy P, Gahegan M, Roberts JC, Rodgers P, Theus M (2005) Creating instruments for ideation: Software approaches to geovisualization. In: Dykes J, MacEachren AM, Kraak J-M (eds) Exploring geovisualization. Elsevier, Amsterdam, chapter 5, pp 103–125 Babcock C (2007) Data, data, everywhere. InformationWeek, January 9, . Accessed on 24 May 2008 Bar-Zeev A (2007) How Google Earth [really] works. RealityPrime blog, July 3, . Accessed on 22 May 2008 Barford P, Crovella M (1999) Measuring Web performance in the wide area. ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review 27(2):37–48 Bates PC (1995) Debugging heterogeneous distributed systems using event-based models of behavior. ACM Transactions on Computing Systems 13(1):1–31 Beaumont JR (1991) GIS and market analysis. In: Maguire DJ, Goodkind MF, Rhind DW (eds) Geographical information systems, vol 2: Applications. Longman, Harlow, UK, chapter 45, pp 139–151 Cammack RG (1999) New map design challenges: Interactive map products for the World Wide Web. In: Cartwright W, Peterson MP, Gartner G (eds) Multimedia cartography. Springer, Berlin, chapter 16, pp 155–172 Chang F, Dean J, Ghemawat S, Hsieh WC, Wallach DA, Burrows M, Chandra T, Fikes A, Gruber RE (2006) Bigtable: A distributed storage system for structured data. In: Proceedings of the 7th symposium on operating systems design and implementation (OSDI '06). Seattle, Washington, pp 205–218 CIA (2008) The world factbook. . Central Intelligence Agency, Washington DC. Accessed on 24 May 2008 Dent BD (1990) Cartography: Thematic map design, 2nd edn. Wm. C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, Indiana Dodge M, Kitchin R (2001) Mapping cyberspace. Routledge, London Eick SG (2001) Visualizing online activity. Communications of the ACM 44(8):45–50 Enslow PH (1978) What is a “distributed” data processing system. IEEE Computting 1(1):13–21 Garrett JJ (2005) Ajax: A new approach to Web applications. Web essay, . Adaptive Path, LLC. Accessed on 25 May 2008 Gibbins H, Buyya R (2006) Gridscape II: A customisable and pluggable grid monitoring portal and its integration with Google Maps. Technical report GRIDS-TR-2006-8, May 12. Grid Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Golub E, Shneiderman B (2003) Dynamic query visualisations on World Wide Web clients: A DHTML solution for maps and scattergrams. International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology 1(1):63–78 Google (2008) Google Maps API. . Accessed on 24 May 2008 Jiang B, Ormeling F (2000) Mapping cyberspace: Visualizing, analysing and exploring virtual worlds. The Cartographic Journal 37(2):117–122 Kingston R (2002) Web-based PPGIS in the United Kingdom. In: Craig WJ, Harris TM, Weiner D (eds) Community participation and geographic information systems. Taylor & Francis, London, chapter 8, pp 101–112 Kitchin R, Dodge M (2002) ‘There’s no there there’: Virtual reality, space and geographic visualization. In: Unwin D, Fisher P (eds) Virtual reality in geography. Taylor & Francis, London, chapter 23, pp 341–361 Lamm SE, Reed DA, Scullin WH (1996) Real-time geographic visualization of World Wide Web traffic. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 28(7–11):1457–1468 (May) Longley P, Goodchild M, Maguire D, Rhind D (2005) Geographic information systems and science, 2nd edn. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, UK MacEachren AM (1998) Cartography, GIS and the World Wide Web. Progress in Human Geography 22(4):575–585 Maxmind (2008) GeoLite City: Free geolocation database. . Maxmind LLC. Accessed on 24 May 2008 Offutt J (2002) Quality attributes of Web software applications. IEEE Software 19(2):25–32 Papadakakis N, Markatos EP, Papathanasiou AE (1998) Palantir: A visualization tool for the World Wide Web. In: Proceedings of the INET’98 conference. Geneva, Switzerland Sale A, McGee C (2006) Tasmania statistics software. . University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Accessed on 25 May 2008 Sayar A, Pierce M, Fox, G (2006) Integrating AJAX approach into GIS visualization Web services. In: Proceedings of the advanced international conference on telecommunications and international conference on Internet and Web applications and services (AICT/ICIW 2006). IEEE Computer Society, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean, pp 169–175 Stanger N, McGregor, G (2006) Hitting the ground running: Building New Zealand’s first publicly available institutional repository. Discussion paper 2006/07. Department of Information Science, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Stanger N, McGregor, G (2007) EPrints makes its mark. OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 23(2):133–141 Wood J, Brodlie K, Wright H (1996) Visualization over the World Wide Web and its application to environmental data. In: Yagel R, Nielson GM (eds) Proceedings of IEEE visualization ’96. IEEE Computer Society and ACM, San Francisco, California, pp 81–86 Zhao H, Shneiderman B (2005) Colour-coded pixel-based highly interactive Web mapping for georeferenced data exploration. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19(4):413–42