A Design Environment for Scientific and Program Visualizations

Abstract

While the field of visualization has grown rapidly over the last decade, the task of designing graphical displays that depict effectively the data to be visualized is still a time-consuming, difficult, and essentially manual process. The Integrated Visualization Environment (IVE) system incorporates tools for partially automating the design of scientific and program visualizations. One of the major strengths of the IVE design system is that the design process for both scientific and program visualizations takes place in a uniform fashion, based on the cooperative computer-aided design (CCAD) paradigm. CCAD combines the strengths of manual and automated design by interspersing guiding operations by the human user with the automatic exploration of design alternatives by the computer. Given a set of design requirements, the system is able to generate several alternative visualizations using aset of design rules. These alternatives are presented graphically to the user, who can browse through them, select the most promising visualization, and refine it manually.