Balogh Gergő

University of Szeged

Validation of the City Metaphor in Software VisualizationGergő BaloghThe rapid evolution of computers made it possible to handle a large amount of information.New algorithms were invented to process data and new ways emerged to store their results.However, the final recipients of these are still the users themselves, so we have to presentthe information in such a way that the human brain could understand it. One of the manypossibilities is to convert the data into a graphical representation. This conversion is calledvisualization. Various kinds of method exist, beginning with simple charts through compoundcurves and splines to complex three-dimensional scene rendering. However, there is one pointin common; all of these methods use some underlying model, a sort of language to express itscontent.The increased performance of graphical units and processors made it possible and the data-processing technologies made it necessary to renew and to reinvent these visualization meth-ods. In this research, we focus on the so called city-metaphor which displays information asbuildings, districts, and streets.Our main goal is to find a way to map the data to the entities in the fictional city. To allow theusers to navigate freely in the artificial environment and to perceive the meaning of the objects,we have to find the difference between a realistic and an unrealistic city. To do this, we haveto measure how much it is truth to reality or the city-likeness of our virtual creations. In thispaper, we present four computable metrics which express various features of a city. These arecompactness for measuring space consumption, eccentricity for describing the shape of the city,connectivity for showing the low level coherence between the buildings, and homogeneity forexpressing the smoothness of the landscape. These metrics will be defined in a formal and aninformal way, illustrated with examples. The connection among the high level city-likeness andthese low level metrics will be analysed. Our preliminary assumptions about these metrics willbe compared to the intuitions of users collected by an online survey. Finally, we will summariseour results and propose a way to compute the city-likeness metric.References[1] Wettel, Richard and Lanza, Michele. CodeCity: 3D visualization of large-scale software,Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering, 2008[2] Balogh, Gergő and Beszedes, Arpad. CodeMetropolis-code visualisation in MineCraft,Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2013 IEEE 13th ICSM, 20136

Validation of the city metaphor in software visualization

http://acta.bibl.u-szeged.hu/61651/1/cscs_2014_006.pdf

Validation of the city metaphor in software visualization

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