A Flexible Approach for Visualization Development

Abstract

Visualization problems nowadays often incorporate increasingly high complexities that may emerge from tremendous data volume, combined data types, the need of integrating multiple visualizations, visualization evaluation, and/or multiple paradigms/domains covered. These issues significantly exacerbate the difficulties involved in the development of flexible and effective visualization solutions. Dealing with such complex problems often requires visualizations to be developed in a manner that they can be flexibly created, instantiated, manipulated, customized, integrated with other visualizations, executed and modified. However, while existing visualization techniques and systems tend to provide reasonable support for particular paradigms, domains and data types, they are quite weak when it comes to addressing such flexibility requirements. To address these issues and requirements, we propose an information generation, representation and presentation (IGRP) approach to support visualization to be designed/modeled/implemented in a flexible manner. This approach is specified and demonstrated through IGRP reference model, framework and architecture that highlight the idea of developing visualizations through manipulating, creating, modifying, enhancing, mapping and integrating the IGRP related data, models, solvers and scenarios. A prototypical system is also implemented and discussed as a proof of concept.