National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for e-Design

Visual Interfaces for Engineering InnovationPeter Radics, Nicholas Polys (Virginia Tech); Anthony McCaffrey, Sundar Krishnamurty (UMass)

Problem statement

Approach and method

Current state of practice and research

Project plan

Deliverables and benefits

LIFE form comments addressed

Industrial relevance

Thrust area: New Design Paradigms and Processes

Project type: Current

Percent complete: 66%

IAB funds: 50%

Other funds: 50% - some other research grant

The following factors raise the complexity of the task:

• Graphs often contain large amounts of metadata

• Hairball Effect: With increasing complexity, graph turns into “hairball”

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Flexible input format support

• E.g., GraphML, OWL, …Image

Many traditional toolkits to choose from, but:

• Limited input format support

• Limited output format support

• Limited ability to provide mappings

• Limited extensibility

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ImageAbstraction of Mappings

• Allows for domain-specific visualization

Flexible output format support

• E.g., X3D, OpenGL, …

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Open-source Java graph-visualization toolkit with a modular architecture

• Internal data structure from 1st principles to represent arbitrary graphs

• Separable concerns: loaders, mapping providers, and exporters

• Flexibility to define mappings of node and edge attributes to visual markers

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Fall 2012:

• OWL File Loader v1

• X3D Solar layout mapping v1

Spring 2013: User studies and evaluations

Gantt chart

Users of the results of this project:

• Researchers doing human-subject experiments with graphs, specifically ontologies

• Developers of applications with graph-visualization components

Use of access metrics (frequency of query, etc.):

• Can be stored in metadata and mapped to visual property

In this box, briefly explain how your project advances practice and/or research.

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Graph visualization/exploration is hard!