The use of time as a parameter in an information visualisation tool is not common, but has considerable potential. Following an introduction to the concept of time as a control and presentation mechanism, we consider the specific technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), familiar to many from the activity of riffling of a book to answer questions such as "What's there?" and "Is it here?" Examples will be presented, relevant phenomena demonstrated and issues discussed. An important trade-off rendering RSVP potentially valuable to application domains based on small displays is then identified and illustrated in the context of web browsing via a mobile telephone display.
The exploration of large data sets is a difficult process. Visualization techniques are of high importance in this process because they allow a direct integration of the human in the data exploration process and combine the flexibility, creativity, and general knowledge of the human with the enormous storage capacity and the computational power of today's computers. Visual database exploration is especially powerful for the first steps of the data exploration process, namely understanding the data and generating hypotheses about the data. It may, however, also significantly contribute to the actual knowledge discovery process by guiding the search using visual feedback. The talk provides a brief overview of visual data exploration techniques - including interaction and distortion techniques which are used in conjunction with the visualization techniques. The talk especially focusses on techniques which can be used to visualize very large data sets. The basic idea of those techniques is to map each data value to one pixel of the display. The talk introduces different variants of the so-called pixel-oriented visualization techniques and discusses the issues which are important in designing and using them. Application examples show that pixel-oriented techniques can be used effectively to explore very large databases.
There has been a revolution in our ability to explore and simulate cities during the last twenty years, and much of this has been due to the emergence of extensive digital data sources in both the physical and socio-economic domains. In this paper, we review the brief history of this field, making an immediate distinction between data concerning the geometry and related physical characteristics of cities, and the socio-economic data associated with individuals, groups, institutions and so on that make up the functioning of the city. The main technologies that have emerged to handle these data sets are geographic information systems – GIS – which essentially emanate from the geographical sciences and deal with two-dimensional map data, and computer aided design – CAD – softwares which deal with the 3-dimensional qualities of the urban environment. GIS software has much greater functionality than CAD in that the main purpose is for analysis rather than visualization although neither software deals with urban processes and functions which are the subject of urban simulation.
On the basis of these data sets, two different kinds of model and related visualizations are clear. First there are traditional computer models of how cities work in two-dimensions which are usually aggregate, deal with urban patterns such as traffic and locations, and require large scale data of diverse types at as fine a resolution as possible. Such data and their models are preferably temporally dynamic and thus very large scale. GIS is often seen as the software which unlocks these type of data but in general software for these models is purpose built. In contrast at the other extreme there are computer models of how cities look and although these too use large data sets which are more homogeneous, these usually use proprietary CAD. There is considerable merging of these data and software at present as 2-d GIS begins to capture the 3rd dimension. In this paper, we will review all these ideas, impressing on you the state of the art, showing how diverse this is and how idiosyncratic but illustrating these ideas from several examples that my group has been working with as well as others. For a sample of these look at our web site http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/ .
Really useful information visualization would support people over a wide range of everyday work activities. But that is a tough problem because in such settings information is often needed in eclectic combinations which are constantly shifting in relation to context. Worse, in real work settings information is created, used and modified collaboratively, in teams with fluid membership. Drawing on ethnographic studies of landscape architects at work, this paper presents a human-centered approach to information visualization. We have developed a prototype 3D collaborative electronic workspace that allows people to configure, save, and browse arrangements of heterogeneous work materials. A network of links between parts of documents and objects underpins this spatio-temporal order. Both spatial arrangements and links are created and maintained as an integral part of ongoing work with the 'live' documents and objects that populate these arrangements. The result is an extension of the physical information space of the architects' studio that utilizes the potential of electronic data storage, visualization, and network technologies to support work with information in context. We use this prototype to explore the issues involved in designing information systems which reflect the social organisation of work practice.
Until recently, knowledge structures of a scientific community have been privileged knowledge and little of the contemporary work in information visualization has focused on depicting the big picture of a scientific discipline. In contrast to well-studied information visualization for information retrieval, an emphasis on revealing salient patterns and trends at a disciplinary level may add a challenging but potentially rewarding focus to the field of information visualization. I will talk about our recent work in this area and explain what visualizing scientific knowledge has to do with philosophy of science and why searching for black holes in the Universe and deciding your diet might have something in common.
A variety of problems in areas as diverse as engineering, computational chemistry and product development yield solutions that may all be regarded as an ordered sequence of positions in space. The origins of these solutions differ, for example, the locus of a structure oscillating under some driving force, like the changing concentrations of chemicals taking part in a reaction, are both derived by solving a set of differential equations. In the case of product development, however, it is the minimisation of an objective function characterising the quality of the design that produces a `walk' through parameter space. Although conceptually similar, these systems are different in terms of the numbers of variables they involve, so the space we have to visualize may be the three-dimensional one we normally inhabit or some abstract, high-dimensional place.
Graph-like structures arise in diverse applications, from models of social and economic organisation through transport systems, to networks and software structures. A number of systems for graph visualization have become quite well known, but the area still contains fundamental challenges. The talk will briefly describe and demonstrate work carried out in collaboration with researchers at CWI in Amsterdam on techniques and tools for extending the reach of graph visualization to larger structures, in particular through skeletonization and clustering. Ongoing work, and the research questions it is addressing, will be summarised.