Knowledge visualization: A new framework for interactive graphic interface design

Diagrams communicate massive amounts of information at a glance. Complex domains can be simplified and extended with diagrammatic notations. Computational systems can certainly benefit from the use of diagrams. However, graphic interfaces are difficult and time consuming to write. We need a way of shortening the graphic-interface building cycle so that it is relatively easy and fast to add a graphic interface to any application that may benefit from it.A general-purpose, graphic-interface-building tool kit that a designer or user, not a programmer, can use to design and attach graphic interfaces to applications can greatly speed up and lower the costs of adding graphics to systems. In this paper, I describe a new framework for interactive graphic interface design. The framework will enable graphic-interface-building tools which are general purpose, inter-active, and application-specific.The framework consists of a taxonomy (ontology) of visual properties that span sub-object properties, full objects, and the relationships between objects. The taxonomy forms a skeleton on which to hang methods for manipulating these visual properties, objects, relations, and composites. The methods consist of the generation of prototypes, the recognition of properties in objects, and mouse manipulation functions for modifying properties in an object. Further characteristics of the framework are that the properties are composable, that objects can be explicitly, incrementally described through repeated composition and application of recognition methods, and that the composition of properties to form more fully described and more complex objects is recursive. This makes the framework and the objects within it quite flexible, incremental, uniform, and modular.     

An interactive language for computer-aided identification and control system design

A new interactive command language was developed to implement integrated computer-aided design in computer control applications. It is intended to operate at the supervisory level in a real-time hierarchical system.The integrated approach is based on convolution algebra and provides a unified conceptual framework for studying the behaviour of practical systems in the time domain. Consequently, as an alternative to choosing fixed system structures and design procedures, the user may evaluate experimental procedures suggested by the underlying theory.The language has been implemented on a minicomputer at Bradford University and applied to industrial control problems. The highly flexible and practical aspects of the language are demonstrated.     

Declarative optimization-based drama management in interactive fiction

Our work relates to automatically guiding experiences in large, open-world interactive dramas and story-based experiences where a player interacts with and influences a story. A drama manager (DM) is a system that watches a story as it progresses, reconfiguring the world to fulfill the author's goals. A DM might notice a player doing something that fits poorly with the current story and attempt to dissuade him or her. This is accomplished using soft actions such as having a nonplayer character start a conversation with a player to lure him or her to something else, or by more direct actions such as locking doors. We present work applying search-based drama management (SBDM) to the interactive fiction piece Anchorhead, to further investigate the algorithmic and authorship issues involved. Declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM) guides the player by projecting possible future stories and reconfiguring the story world based on those projections. This approach models stories as a set of possible plot points, and an author-specified evaluation function rates the quality of a particular plot-point sequence.     

Advanced interactive visualization for CFD

New ideas are presented for the visualization of computational fluid dynamics data. These include both unsteady two-dimensional and steady three-dimensional data on either structured or unstructured grids. In addition to presenting some specific algorithm advances, considerable attention is devoted to innovative interactive probes and the appropriate choice of program architecture and internal data structure.     

Ambiguity-free edge-bundling for interactive graph visualization

Graph visualization has been widely used to understand and present both global structural and local adjacency information in relational data sets (e.g., transportation networks, citation networks, or social networks). Graphs with dense edges, however, are difficult to visualize because fast layout and good clarity are not always easily achieved. When the number of edges is large, edge bundling can be used to improve the clarity, but in many cases, the edges could be still too cluttered to permit correct interpretation of the relations between nodes. In this paper, we present an ambiguity-free edge-bundling method especially for improving local detailed view of a complex graph. Our method makes more efficient use of display space and supports detail-on-demand viewing through an interactive interface. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with public coauthorship network data.     

A language for molecular visualization

The features and implementation of Pdbq, a special-purpose, interpreted language based on the C programing language, are described. Pdbq provides data types, control structures, operators, and built-in functions for specifying visualization mappings. The language arose from research into the specification of novel geometries from molecular data. Pdbq's data types, flow control, built-in functions, and global variables are discussed. Visualization examples using the language are presented     

Highly interactive distributed visualization

We report on our iGrid2005 demonstration, called the “Dead Cat Demo”; an example of a highly interactive augmented reality application consisting of software services distributed over a wide-area, high-speed network. We describe our design decisions, analyse the implications of the design on application performance and show performance measurements.     

Style grammars for interactive visualization of architecture

Interactive visualization of architecture provides a way to quickly visualize existing or novel buildings and structures. Such applications require both fast rendering and an effortless input regimen for creating and changing architecture using high-level editing operations that automatically fill in the necessary details. Procedural modeling and synthesis is a powerful paradigm that yields high data amplification and can be coupled with fast-rendering techniques to quickly generate plausible details of a scene without much or any user interaction. Previously, forward generating procedural methods have been proposed where a procedure is explicitly created to generate particular content. In this paper, we present our work in inverse procedural modeling of buildings and describe how to use an extracted repertoire of building grammars to facilitate the visualization and quick modification of architectural structures and buildings. We demonstrate an interactive application where the user draws simple building blocks and, using our system, can automatically complete the building "in the style of other buildings using view-dependent texture mapping or nonphotorealistic rendering techniques. Our system supports an arbitrary number of building grammars created from user subdivided building models and captured photographs. Using only edit, copy, and paste metaphors, the entire building styles can be altered and transferred from one building to another in a few operations, enhancing the ability to modify an existing architectural structure or to visualize a novel building in the style of the others.     

Data parallel volume-rendering algorithms for interactive visualization

The increasing availability of parallel computing platforms has led to the development of parallel volume-rendering algorithms. In the present paper we compare two algorithms for volume raytracing in a data-parallel framework: a shearing technique and a line-drawing technique. The two algorithms are primarily distinguished by the level of parallelism they exploit. Both algorithms have been implemented on the Connection Machine CM2 massively parallel computer and execute at speeds suitable for interactive volume-rendering applications. Since considerable floating-point resources are available on the CM2, we have used rendering algorithms based on transport theory. In the second part of the paper we examine some of the tradeoffs involved between image quality and rendering speed when using high-fidelity rendering algorithms.     

Strategy-based interactive cluster visualization for information retrieval

In this paper we investigate a general purpose interactive information organization system. The system organizes documents by placing them into 1-, 2-, or 3-dimensional space based on their similarity and a spring-embedding algorithm. We begin by developing a method for estimating the quality of the organization when it is applied to a set of documents returned in response to a query. We show how the relevant documents tend to clump together in space. We proceed by presenting a method for measuring the amount of structure in the organization and explain how this knowledge can be used to refine the system. We also show that increasing the dimensionality of the organization generally improves its quality, albeit only a small amount. We introduce two methods for modifying the organization based on information obtained from the user and show how such feedback improves the organization. All the analysis is done offline without direct user intervention. Received: 21 December 1998 / Revised: 30 May 1999     

基于Web的PSE-Bio交互式可视化

PSE-Bio是一个基于Web服务面向生物信息学的问题求解平台。为了方便用户仅使用浏览器就能分析调用服务返回的结果,采用SVG技术实现基于WEB的可视化,设计了面向对象的统一可视化数据对象以封装调用不同Web服务返回的消息;设计了面向对象的可视化图形对象以利于交互可视化的实现;并用SVG脚本语言实现了用户与图形的交互以及可视化结果与服务的交互。实验结果表明,基于SVG的可视化方案能够满足生物信息数据的Web可视化需求。     

An interactive data visualization system

GRAFANA is an interactive program, which allows the user to produce drawings based on data stored on a disk file. The major advantage and originality of the system is that the user can interactively determine the visual effect of a drawing and immediately see it on the screen. Moreover, any drawing produced by GRAFANA can still be edited by a generalpurpose graphics editor. This system allows the user to obtain precisely the right drawing for any book, paper or report. GRAFANA has been implemented in MIRA-2D, a graphical Pascal extension. It is available for different machines and kinds of graphical devices.     

Distance visualization for interactive 3D implant planning

An instant and quantitative assessment of spatial distances between two objects plays an important role in interactive applications such as virtual model assembly, medical operation planning, or computational steering. While some research has been done on the development of distance-based measures between two objects, only very few attempts have been reported to visualize such measures in interactive scenarios. In this paper we present two different approaches for this purpose, and we investigate the effectiveness of these approaches for intuitive 3D implant positioning in a medical operation planning system. The first approach uses cylindrical glyphs to depict distances, which smoothly adapt their shape and color to changing distances when the objects are moved. This approach computes distances directly on the polygonal object representations by means of ray/triangle mesh intersection. The second approach introduces a set of slices as additional geometric structures, and uses color coding on surfaces to indicate distances. This approach obtains distances from a precomputed distance field of each object. The major findings of the performed user study indicate that a visualization that can facilitate an instant and quantitative analysis of distances between two objects in interactive 3D scenarios is demanding, yet can be achieved by including additional monocular cues into the visualization.     

An interactive FORTRAN program for three-dimensional molecular visualization

An interactive FORTRAN program executable in the VAX/VMS computer environment has been developed for three-dimensional molecular visualization on the Evans & Sutherland Picture System 390. The essential features of this program are described and the FORTRAN source code is available upon request.     

Web-based dynamic and interactive environmental visualization

The development of novel interactive visualizations can substantially contribute to environmental modeling and understanding of complex environmental processes. To allow the Web Map Service (WMS) to support this, this paper explores a generic framework in which a dynamic environmental modeling process can be interactively visualized, controlled and tuned on the Internet by using Java 3D-based hybrid Internet computation through the simulation steering technique. A hydrological model, TOPMODEL, is employed to illustrate the simulation of a rainfall-run off process within a computational and steering environment. This environment allows users to visually interact and experiment with model computation, thereby facilitating the exploration of process-based environmental applications.     

Pursuing interactive visualization of irregular grids

Many branches of the sciences produce sample data not arranged on rectilinear grids, and visualization of such data is generally more complex than visualizing more regular data. While isosurface algorithms such as marching cubes can be adapted with relatively little performance penalty, direct volume rendering presents more difficulties. This paper explores these issues, concentrating on algorithms for a particular kind of irregular grid known as a curvilinear grid, composed of six-sided cells that may be considered a result of the deformation of a regular rectilinear grid.     

3D stereo interactive medical visualization

Our interactive, 3D stereo display helps guide clinicians during endovascular procedures, such as intraoperative needle insertion and stent placement relative to the target organs. We describe a new method of guiding endovascular procedures using interactive 3D stereo visualizations. We use as an example the transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) procedure. Our goal is to increase the speed and safety of endovascular procedures by providing the interventionalist with 3D information as the operation proceeds. Our goal is to provide 3D image guidance of the TIPS procedure so that the interventionalist can readily adjust the needle position and trajectory to reach the target on the first pass. We propose a 3D stereo display of the interventionalist's needle and target vessels. We also add interactivity via head tracking so that the interventionalist gains a better 3D sense of the relationship between the target vessels and the needle during needle advancement.     

MOLVIE: an interactive visualization environment for molecular structures

A Molecular visualization interactive environment (MOLVIE), is designed to display three-dimensional (3D) structures of molecules and support the structural analysis and research on proteins. The paper presents the features, design considerations and applications of MOLVIE, especially the new functions used to compare the structures of two molecules and view the partial fragment of a molecule. Being developed in JAVA, MOLVIE is platform-independent. Moreover, it may run on a webpage as an applet for remote users. MOLVIE is available at http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~mli/Bioinf/software/index.html.