Snap2Diverse: Coordinating Information Visualizations and Virtual Environments

The field of Information Visualization is concerned with improving with how users perceive, understand, and interact with visual representations of data sets. Immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) excel at providing researchers and designers a greater comprehension of the spatial features and relations of their data, models, and scenes. This project addresses the intersection of these two fields where information is visualized in a virtual environment. Specifically we are interested in visualizing abstract information in relation to spatial information in the context of a virtual environment. We describe a set of design issues for this type of integrated visualization and demonstrate a coordinated, multiple-views system supporting 2D and 3D visualization tasks such as overview, navigation, details-on-demand, and brushing-and-linking selection. Software architecture issues are discussed with details of our implementation applied to the domain of chemical information and visualization. Lastly, we subject our system to an informal usability evaluation and identify usability issues with interaction and navigation that may guide future work in these situations

Data Visualization and Rapid Analytics: Applying Tableau Desktop to Support Library Decision-Making

Data visualization offers librarians the ability to better manage, explore and present information collected by various individuals throughout a library organization. This article discusses The Ohio State University Libraries experiments with Tableau, a sophisticated data-visualization and rapid analytics software. Tableau allows librarians to blend and leverage data collected from a number of disparate sources, including transaction logs, Google Analytics, and e-resource usage reports. The article provides context for incorporating data-visualization into the OSU Libraries assessment program and shares examples of visualizations created for two data-analysis projects. The benefits of blending and simultaneously viewing visualizations of data from multiple sources are articulated and explored. The article concludes with a short discussion of potential future projects for visualizing library data using Tableau Desktop.Publisher does not allow open access until after publicatio

Visualizing genome and systems biology: technologies, tools, implementation techniques and trends, past, present and future.

"Α picture is worth a thousand words." This widely used adage sums up in a few words the notion that a successful visual representation of a concept should enable easy and rapid absorption of large amounts of information. Although, in general, the notion of capturing complex ideas using images is very appealing, would 1000 words be enough to describe the unknown in a research field such as the life sciences? Life sciences is one of the biggest generators of enormous datasets, mainly as a result of recent and rapid technological advances; their complexity can make these datasets incomprehensible without effective visualization methods. Here we discuss the past, present and future of genomic and systems biology visualization. We briefly comment on many visualization and analysis tools and the purposes that they serve. We focus on the latest libraries and programming languages that enable more effective, efficient and faster approaches for visualizing biological concepts, and also comment on the future human-computer interaction trends that would enable for enhancing visualization further

VTrace-A Tool for Visualizing Traceability Links Among Software Artefacts for an Evolving System

Traceability Management plays a key role in tracing the life of a requirement through all the specifications produced during the development phase of a software project. A lack of traceability information not only hinders the understanding of the system but also will prove to be a bottleneck in the future maintenance of the system. Projects that maintain traceability information during the development stages somehow fail to upgrade their artefacts or maintain traceability among the different versions of the artefacts that are produced during the maintenance phase. As a result the software artefacts lose the trustworthiness and engineers mostly work from the source code for impact analysis. The goal of our research is on understanding the impact of visualizing traceability links on change management tasks for an evolving system. As part of our research we have implemented a Traceability Visualization Tool-VTrace that manages software artefacts and also enables the visualization of traceability links. The results of our controlled experiment show that subjects who used the tool were more accurate and faster on change management tasks than subjects that didn't use the tool

Visualization of Processes in Self-Learning Systems

One aspect of self-organizing systems is their desired ability to be self-learning, i.e., to be able to adapt dynamically to conditions in their environment. This quality is awkward especially if it comes to applications in security or safety-sensitive areas. Here a step towards more trustful systems could be taken by providing transparency of the processes of a system. An important means of giving feedback to an operator is the visualization of the internal processes of a system. In this position paper we address the problem of visualizing dynamic processes especially in self-learning systems. We take an existing self-learning system from the field of computer vision as an example from which we derive questions of general interest such as possible options to visualize the flow of information in a dynamic learning system or the visualization of symbolic data. As a side effect the visualization of learning processes may provide a better understanding of underlying principles of learning in general, i.e, also in biological systems. That may also facilitate improved designs of future self-learning systems

VTrace-A Tool for Visualizing Traceability Links among Software Artefacts for an Evolving System

Traceability Management plays a key role in tracing the life of a requirement through all the specifications produced during the development phase of a software project. A lack of traceability information not only hinders the understanding of the system but also will prove to be a bottleneck in the future maintenance of the system. Projects that maintain traceability information during the development stages somehow fail to upgrade their artefacts or maintain traceability among the different versions of the artefacts that are produced during the maintenance phase. As a result the software artefacts lose the trustworthiness and engineers mostly work from the source code for impact analysis. The goal of our research is on understanding the impact of visualizing traceability links on change management tasks for an evolving system. As part of our research we have implemented a Traceability Visualization Tool-VTrace that manages software artefacts and also enables the visualization of traceability links. The results of our controlled experiment show that subjects who used the tool were more accurate and faster on change management tasks than subjects that didn’t use the tool

A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application