Do you see what I mean?

Visualizers, like logicians, have long been concerned with meaning. Generalizing from MacEachren's overview of cartography, visualizers have to think about how people extract meaning from pictures (psychophysics), what people understand from a picture (cognition), how pictures are imbued with meaning (semiotics), and how in some cases that meaning arises within a social and/or cultural context. If we think of the communication acts carried out in the visualization process further levels of meaning are suggested. Visualization begins when someone has data that they wish to explore and interpret; the data are encoded as input to a visualization system, which may in its turn interact with other systems to produce a representation. This is communicated back to the user(s), who have to assess this against their goals and knowledge, possibly leading to further cycles of activity. Each phase of this process involves communication between two parties. For this to succeed, those parties must share a common language with an agreed meaning. We offer the following three steps, in increasing order of formality: terminology (jargon), taxonomy (vocabulary), and ontology. Our argument in this article is that it's time to begin synthesizing the fragments and views into a level 3 model, an ontology of visualization. We also address why this should happen, what is already in place, how such an ontology might be constructed, and why now

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

Evaluation criteria of software visualization systems used for program comprehension

The program understanding task is usually very time and effort consuming. In a traditional way the code is inspected line by line by the user without any kind of help. But this becomes impossible for larger systems. Some software systems were created in order to generate automatically explanations, metrics, statistics and visualizations to describe the syntax and the semantics of programs. This kind of tools are called Program Comprehension Systems. One of the most important feature used in this kind of tool is the software visualization. We feel that it would be very useful to define criteria for evaluating visualization systems that are used for program comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to present a set of parameters to characterize Program Comprehension-Oriented Software Visualization Systems. We also propose new parameters to improve the current taxonomies in order to cover the visualization of the Problem Domain.FC

Mapping Tasks to Interactions for Graph Exploration and Graph Editing on Interactive Surfaces

Graph exploration and editing are still mostly considered independently and systems to work with are not designed for todays interactive surfaces like smartphones, tablets or tabletops. When developing a system for those modern devices that supports both graph exploration and graph editing, it is necessary to 1) identify what basic tasks need to be supported, 2) what interactions can be used, and 3) how to map these tasks and interactions. This technical report provides a list of basic interaction tasks for graph exploration and editing as a result of an extensive system review. Moreover, different interaction modalities of interactive surfaces are reviewed according to their interaction vocabulary and further degrees of freedom that can be used to make interactions distinguishable are discussed. Beyond the scope of graph exploration and editing, we provide an approach for finding and evaluating a mapping from tasks to interactions, that is generally applicable. Thus, this work acts as a guideline for developing a system for graph exploration and editing that is specifically designed for interactive surfaces.Comment: 21 pages, minor corrections (typos etc.

Modeling Faceted Browsing with Category Theory for Reuse and Interoperability

Faceted browsing (also called faceted search or faceted navigation) is an exploratory search model where facets assist in the interactive navigation of search results. Facets are attributes that have been assigned to describe resources being explored; a faceted taxonomy is a collection of facets provided by the interface and is often organized as sets, hierarchies, or graphs. Faceted browsing has become ubiquitous with modern digital libraries and online search engines, yet the process is still difficult to abstractly model in a manner that supports the development of interoperable and reusable interfaces. We propose category theory as a theoretical foundation for faceted browsing and demonstrate how the interactive process can be mathematically abstracted in order to support the development of reusable and interoperable faceted systems. Existing efforts in facet modeling are based upon set theory, formal concept analysis, and light-weight ontologies, but in many regards they are implementations of faceted browsing rather than a specification of the basic, underlying structures and interactions. We will demonstrate that category theory allows us to specify faceted objects and study the relationships and interactions within a faceted browsing system. Resulting implementations can then be constructed through a category-theoretic lens using these models, allowing abstract comparison and communication that naturally support interoperability and reuse. In this context, reuse and interoperability are at two levels: between discrete systems and within a single system. Our model works at both levels by leveraging category theory as a common language for representation and computation. We will establish facets and faceted taxonomies as categories and will demonstrate how the computational elements of category theory, including products, merges, pushouts, and pullbacks, extend the usefulness of our model. More specifically, we demonstrate that categorical constructions such as the pullback and pushout operations can help organize and reorganize facets; these operations in particular can produce faceted views containing relationships not found in the original source taxonomy. We show how our category-theoretic model of facets relates to database schemas and discuss how this relationship assists in implementing the abstractions presented. We give examples of interactive interfaces from the biomedical domain to help illustrate how our abstractions relate to real-world requirements while enabling systematic reuse and interoperability. We introduce DELVE (Document ExpLoration and Visualization Engine), our framework for developing interactive visualizations as modular Web-applications in order to assist researchers with exploratory literature search. We show how facets relate to and control visualizations; we give three examples of text visualizations that either contain or interact with facets. We show how each of these visualizations can be represented with our model and demonstrate how our model directly informs implementation. With our general framework for communicating consistently about facets at a high level of abstraction, we enable the construction of interoperable interfaces and enable the intelligent reuse of both existing and future efforts

Product information management for complex modular security systems

Um sistema PIM gere toda a informação que possibilita a comercialização dos produtos através de diferentes canais. A sua importância durante o ciclo de vida de um produto aumentou devido à sofisticação técnica dos produtos, a gerir internamente e a publicar externamente. Sistemas, tais como o ERP e o CCMS, deverão integrar-se com um sistema PIM, o qual deve funcionar como a “espinha dorsal” da informação de produto. O presente projeto tem como objetivo principal a criação de uma solução para gerir a informação de produto para sistemas modulares complexos. A proposta de solução inclui a criação de uma ontologia para parte dos inúmeros sistemas disponíveis no catálogo de produtos de uma das maiores organizações multinacionais do setor de engenharia e tecnologia a nível mundial. O processo de criação da solução proposta baseou-se na metodologia de investigação pesquisa-ação e foi dividido em cinco fases. Na fase de diagnóstico descreveu-se e analisou-se a atual situação dos sistemas ERP e CCMS que gerem o catálogo online dos sistemas de produtos comercializados. Levantaram-se ainda as taxonomias de produto atuais e elaborou-se a proposta. Na fase de planeamento da ação descreveram-se a equipa de trabalho, a abordagem inspirada na metodologia Agile usada para desenvolver a solução, as reuniões de planeamento, os parceiros de trabalho, as ferramentas a usar e a sua justificação. Na fase de tomada de ação foi descrito o processo de criação da solução ontológica e o resultado final, incluindo a construção das novas taxonomias e a sua validação pelos especialistas. Propuseram-se exemplos e representações gráficas usando a ferramenta Protégé. Na fase de avaliação, a solução ontológica foi testada, tendo-se validado que os requisitos necessários foram satisfeitos pela estrutura. Na fase de especificação de aprendizagem propuseram-se os próximos passos para a implementação e gestão futura do modelo ontológico. Com esta solução, a organização poderá gerir mais eficientemente a informação de produto e a estrutura de dados. Ela possui versatilidade para gerir produtos individuais ou sistemas modulares complexos e melhorar a sua comunicação com o cliente. Além disso, a ontologia tem ainda um enorme potencial se combinada com técnicas de IA. Algumas limitações do projeto e propostas de trabalhos futuros foram ainda apresentadas

SizeNet: Weakly Supervised Learning of Visual Size and Fit in Fashion Images

Finding clothes that fit is a hot topic in the e-commerce fashion industry. Most approaches addressing this problem are based on statistical methods relying on historical data of articles purchased and returned to the store. Such approaches suffer from the cold start problem for the thousands of articles appearing on the shopping platforms every day, for which no prior purchase history is available. We propose to employ visual data to infer size and fit characteristics of fashion articles. We introduce SizeNet, a weakly-supervised teacher-student training framework that leverages the power of statistical models combined with the rich visual information from article images to learn visual cues for size and fit characteristics, capable of tackling the challenging cold start problem. Detailed experiments are performed on thousands of textile garments, including dresses, trousers, knitwear, tops, etc. from hundreds of different brands.Comment: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPRW) 2019 Focus on Fashion and Subjective Search - Understanding Subjective Attributes of Data (FFSS-USAD