Position Paper by Tim Dwyer, Colin Murray, Seokhee Hong; School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Australia and National ICT Australia

For the Workshop on "Information Visualization Software Infrastructures" at IEEE 2004 Visualization,
Organized by Katy Bvrner, Indiana University, USA and Jean-Daniel Fekete, INRIA, France

Part I

I.1) What functionality should a general InfoVis infrastructure provide?

We do not believe that any one monolithic system will be able to meet the needs of all visualisation applications.  That is, we do not believe that it is possible for the visualisation community to somehow collaboratively produce a "Microsoft Office" for visualisation.  Examples of commercial systems that have set out to achieve this goal, only to fade into obscurity, abound.  Rather, we believe that the visualisation community should focus on producing simpler -- yet complementary -- tools that each excel in their respective visualisation paradigms --- perhaps analogous to unix command line tools such as grep, sed, cut and so forth.  To be complementary, such tools will need to be simple, open and extensible.  By "simple", we mean that they need to solve a distinct problem in visualisation; "open" ideally means open sourced, but such tools should at least support well documented file formats; "extensible" means that users and application developers can easily add their own functionality through plugins or incorporate the tools into their own applications through well documented APIs.

There is nothing wrong with having several different visualisation packages as long as they are complementary. There is probably no such thing as a "universal visualisation package". The biggest obstacle preventing systems from working together is file formats.

Part II

Please describe the (information) visualization software infrastructure you are working on.

II.1) Project Name and Web Address

WilmaScope - www.wilmascope.org

II.2) Core Team Members (Please list in order, Role of Project Member, Full Name, E-mail. eg: Developer, John Doe, jdoe@univ.edu)

Manager/Programmer - Tim Dwyer, dwyer@it.usyd.edu.au
Programmer/Layout Expert - Colin Murray, colin.murray@nicta.com.au
Programmer - Christine Wu, christine.wu@nicta.com.au
3DS Max Programmer - Adel Ahmed, adel.ahmed@nicta.com.au

II.3) Project Start Date

January 2001

II.4) Targeted User Group

3D Graph Visualisation community, application developers.

II.5) Supported User Tasks

- 3D Graph visualisation/navigation/interaction
- Rapid prototyping of algorithms
- Production of high resolution still images of 3D graphs
- 3DS Max Scripts

II.6) Major Features of the System Architecture

- 3D Graph Visualisation
- Clustered graph model
- Extensibility of layout engine: users can easily add new algorithms
- Extensibility of glyph appearance through plugins
- API accessible for creating domain specific applications based on Wilma
- Excellent GUI controls for adjusting lighting
- User can generate high resolution images and movies capturing rotation

II.7) Algorithms Provided

- Force-directed layout
- FADE
- High Dimensional Embedding
- Dot hierarchical layout

II.8) Snapshot of the Interface

II.9) Development Platform

Java/Java3D

II.10) Supported Operating Systems

All operating systems supporting JDK1.4

II.5) Software Dependencies/Required Libraries

- Java/Java3D
- Graphvis Dot (optional)

II.5) Current License

LGPL

II.5) Number of Users/Downloads

7329 Downloads

II.5) Pros and Cons

Pros
+ Open Source
+ Extensible
+ Cross platform compatability
+ Interactive Navigation
+ Supports clustered graphs

Cons
- Doesn't scale very smoothly to larger graphs
- Some bugs
- Doesn't support GML and other graph file formats

II.5) Planned Work

- Support automatic conversion from GML to the existing XML based file format
- Fix bugs
- Update web-site
- Better scalability
- More layout algorithms
- Haptic Feedback

Part III

Please describe your main interest in participating in the workshop

Determining the feasibility of combining efforts to create one common, shared IV infrastructure as opposed to 100s of underfunded or proprietary toolkits, platforms and frameworks. Scouring for ideas for a common data protocol for communication between plugins. Eliciting feedback about the IVC software architecture with regard to extensibility and ensuring that it is future-proof.

- Promote WilmaScope
- Promote National ICT Australia's Valacon Project
- Learn about other tools
- Seek cooperation with other related projects
- Find ways to make WilmaScope easier and more desirable to use for people outside of Nicta HUM program.

Please use no more than 4 pages, in this HTML format if possible.
Send the completed paper by Sept. 30, 2004 to mailto:Jean-Daniel.Fekete@inria.fr,katy@indiana.edu.