Research Perspective on Supporting Software Engineering via Physical 3D Models

Building architects, but also civil or mechanical engineers often build from their designs physical3D models for a better presentation, comprehension, and communication among stakeholders. Software engineers usually create visualizations of their software designs as digital objects to be presented on a screen only. 3D software visualization metaphors, such as the software city metaphor, provide a basis for exporting those on-screen software visualizations into physical models. This can be achieved by 3D-printers to transfer the advantages of real, physical, tangible architecture models from traditional engineering disciplines to software engineering. We present a new research perspective of using physical models to support software engineering. Furthermore, we describe four envisioned usage scenarios for physical models which provide a plethora of new research topics. As proof of concept, we investigate the first usage scenario by evaluating the impact of using physical models on program comprehension in teams through a first controlled experiment. Our experiment reveals that the usage of physical models has a diverging influence. However, they improve the team-based program comprehension process for specific tasks by initiating gesture-based interaction. Therefore, the experiment shows that physical models can provide a promising future research direction

Visual Network Analysis of Dynamic Metabolic Pathways

Abstract. We extend our previous work on the exploration of static metabolic networks to evolving, and therefore dynamic, pathways. We apply our visualization software to data from a simulation of early metabolism. Thereby, we show that our technique allows us to test and argue for or against different scenarios for the evolution of metabolic pathways. This supports a profound and efficient analysis of the structure and properties of the generated metabolic networks and its underlying components, while giving the user a vivid impression of the dynamics of the system. The analysis process is inspired by Ben Shneiderman’s mantra of information visualization. For the overview, user-defined diagrams give insight into topological changes of the graph as well as changes in the attribute set associated with the participating enzymes, substances and reactions. This way, “interesting features” in time as well as in space can be recognized. A linked view implementation enables the navigation into more detailed layers of perspective for in-depth analysis of individual network configuration

P ORTOLAN: a Model-Driven Cartography Framework

Processing large amounts of data to extract useful information is an essential task within companies. To help in this task, visualization techniques have been commonly used due to their capacity to present data in synthesized views, easier to understand and manage. However, achieving the right visualization display for a data set is a complex cartography process that involves several transformation steps to adapt the (domain) data to the (visualization) data format expected by visualization tools. To maximize the benefits of visualization we propose Portolan, a generic model-driven cartography framework that facilitates the discovery of the data to visualize, the specification of view definitions for that data and the transformations to bridge the gap with the visualization tools. Our approach has been implemented on top of the Eclipse EMF modeling framework and validated on three different use cases

Holographic data visualization: using synthetic full-parallax holography to share information

This investigation explores representing information through data visualization using the medium holography. It is an exploration from the perspective of a creative practitioner deploying a transdisciplinary approach. The task of visualizing and making use of data and “big data” has been the focus of a large number of research projects during the opening of this century. As the amount of data that can be gathered has increased in a short time our ability to comprehend and get meaning out of the numbers has been brought into attention. This project is looking at the possibility of employing threedimensional imaging using holography to visualize data and additional information. To explore the viability of the concept, this project has set out to transform the visualization of calculated energy and fluid flow data to a holographic medium. A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model of flow around a vehicle, and a model of Solar irradiation on a building were chosen to investigate the process. As no pre-existing software is available to directly transform the data into a compatible format the team worked collaboratively and transdisciplinary in order to achieve an accurate conversion from the format of the calculation and visualization tools to a configuration suitable for synthetic holography production. The project also investigates ideas for layout and design suitable for holographic visualization of energy data. Two completed holograms will be presented. Future possibilities for developing the concept of Holographic Data Visualization are briefly deliberated upon. (c) 2017, Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only

Open source environment to define constraints in route planning for GIS-T

Route planning for transportation systems is strongly related to shortest path algorithms, an optimization problem extensively studied in the literature. To find the shortest path in a network one usually assigns weights to each branch to represent the difficulty of taking such branch. The weights construct a linear preference function ordering the variety of alternatives from the most to the least attractive.Postprint (published version

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Guidelines For Pursuing and Revealing Data Abstractions

Many data abstraction types, such as networks or set relationships, remain unfamiliar to data workers beyond the visualization research community. We conduct a survey and series of interviews about how people describe their data, either directly or indirectly. We refer to the latter as latent data abstractions. We conduct a Grounded Theory analysis that (1) interprets the extent to which latent data abstractions exist, (2) reveals the far-reaching effects that the interventionist pursuit of such abstractions can have on data workers, (3) describes why and when data workers may resist such explorations, and (4) suggests how to take advantage of opportunities and mitigate risks through transparency about visualization research perspectives and agendas. We then use the themes and codes discovered in the Grounded Theory analysis to develop guidelines for data abstraction in visualization projects. To continue the discussion, we make our dataset open along with a visual interface for further exploration