Position Paper by Ming Hao

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

Part I

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

A general InfoVis infrastructure should be a new content-driven. It employs techniques: (1) hidden visual structure and relationships for uncluttering displays; (2) simultaneous visual presentations for high-dimensional knowledge discovery; and (3) a new visual interface to plug in existing graphic toolkits for expanding its use in a wide variety of visual applications. We have applied this infrastructure to three data mining visualization applications - topic hierarchy for document navigation, Internet IT services, and telecom switch mining.

I.2) What do you see as the main technical challenges for creating a central but flexible and universally useful (information) visualization software infrastructure (as opposed to 100 different ones)?

The main technical challenges are to decide which input parameters to choose, which part of information to show, and which layout to choose. They are application dependent.

Part II

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

I am working on information visualization for visually analyzing business process and IT performance for management services.

II.1) Project Name and Web Address

VisMine

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

Ming Hao (primary) and Umeshwar Dayal Ming.hao@hp.com;

II.3) Project Start Date

1999

II.4) Targeted User Group

system analysts

II.5) Supported User Tasks

II.6) Major Features of the System Architecture

content-driven

II.7) Algorithms Provided

similarities, clustering, pixels, maps

II.8) Snapshot of the Interface

three-interfaces: user (application), data, and visual plug-in

II.9) Development Platform

a Java-based client-server model

II.10) Supported Operating Systems

windows XP

II.5) Software Dependencies/Required Libraries

none

II.5) Current License

II.5) Number of Users/Downloads

HP divisions

II.5) Pros and Cons

II.5) Planned Work

Further work is continuing on real-time visual scalability issues

Part III

Please describe your main interest in participating in the workshop

My main interest in participating the workshop is to collaborate with other people for exchanging ideas and information.

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.

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

Created by Jean-Daniel Fekete and Katy Börner on Thur Aug 12 11:15:27 2004