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IAF Calls & Action Lines
Visual data navigation in Web documents
(Mikael Jern, Advanced Visual Systems Aps and Linkoping University)
The contents in Web documents are normally restricted to static items such as text, imagery and animations. "SmartDoc" will deliver "Collaboratories" that incorporate not only text but also the entire interactive data visualisation and navigation process (Figure 2) into a Web document, allowing users and project teams to collaborate and share data, information and insight while distributed over standard or mobile Internet, using intuitive visual navigation techniques. In other words, publishing a text document on the Web is only half the story. The other half is enabling others to interact with the published result and gain insight into context that's meaningful.
A SmartDoc contains embedded Collaboratories that give the reader full access to any discovery and insight, data navigation tools and underlying data. Visual data navigation is provided through interactive 2D and 3D Web-based visualisation components with a small footprint. The "discovery" is described in one or several snapshots providing the history of the visualisation process. These snapshots are a copy of the component's state at the time when the snapshot was taken and allow the user to further interact from the state when the visualisation was snapped. They can be included as an image for printing the document. The underlying data or spreadsheet is either embedded in the document or accessed through a hyperlink. "What are users looking for?" is the key question guiding a SmartDoc process.
The visual data navigators "Collaboratories" is designed to be used 'Out-of-the-Box', developed from a true "atomic" (low-level) component infrastructure (COM and/or Java) with a small footprint suitable for Web distribution and therefore scalable and customisable to any level of expertise. A "SmartViewer" client-side plug-in, responsible for interactivity and graphics rendering, will be developed and distributed as "freeware" to allow free distribution of SmartDoc on the network. Integration and assessment of application component sharing through Web documents and a network infrastructure based on the component industry standards providing real-time data interactivity, reducing the load on the network and with zero administration client deployment.
SmartDoc scales to accommodate massive amounts of data presented in a visual format, allows full real-time interaction with on-screen presentations, and gives business users an unprecedented level of high-quality visual presentation. Our integration of visualisation and data analysis through an "atomic" component architecture combined with special data reduction components and fast scene tree rendering by the SmartViewer enables the visual data navigation of large data sets.
Of central importance to SmartDoc is the Visual User Interface (VUI) that enables the user to directly manipulate graphical objects, which respond interactively and immediately to the user's input actions. The user interacts with both 2D and 3D objects with an immediate graphical feedback response, without the need for moving to a secondary menu window. Example of Direct Manipulation features in an interactive SmartDoc scenario: full-featured scroll bars, filter planes and other interactors, dynamically threshold, crop, filter and downsize data, link charts to identify correlations, drill down through multidimensional data sets, pan, zoom or rotate and "Tilt" interactor constrains rotations to specified angles.
Integration of our visual data navigation techniques in information and knowledge management (KM) systems is another essential goal, which is achieved through emphasis on application-oriented projects, with leading-edge commercial partners in medical, engineering and KM. In particular, the SmartDoc solution creates the means for the decision-makers to fully employ their innate ability to immediately grasp complex relations between coloured, spatial objects as a response to the ever-increasing information load.
SmartDoc's features include:
- Dynamic multi-dimensional graphics that users can interact with in real time
- Rich set of component resources with granular control of details
- Platform/rendering library independence through SmartViewer Plug-in
- Visual User Interface - Tight integration between data and visualisation objects
- Optimised rendering based on scene tree hierarchical graphics structure
- Binning, filter, crop, sort, and aggregation to achieve good interactive response
- Drag, rotate, zoom, pick empowers users to explore data
- Data reduction integrated into visual data navigation
- Full integration with the data warehouse or spreadsheet
- Presentation graphics with axes, legends, annotation and high-resolution hard copy
- Validated through knowledge management, medical and engineering large-scale industrial environments
- Presentation slides
- e-mail: m.jern@helsingborg.se or mikael@avs.dk
- URL: http://www.avs.com/