- Author:
- Paul A. Ferry,
- Advisers:
- John Buchanan,
- Pierre Boulanger
With the increase in the amount of data being generated by today's methods of simulation, experimentation, and direct measurement, there has been a growing interest in the use of graphical representations of data to aid in its exploration, analysis, and interpretation.
One such graphical representation, geometric coding, uses parameterized geometric objects, called glyphs or icons, to encode the data by varying the geometric properties of each glyph with respect to the underlying data. Geometric coding allows integrated images of multiple variables to be constructed, however, as the number of data points displayed increases, the amount of visible variation generated per glyph decreases, potentially obscuring the visibility of interesting structures and patterns in the data.
In this thesis, I present a new system, called Eikon, that extends the use of geometric coding methods to large multivariate datasets. Eikon is based on the determination of interesting features in the data at multiple scales and the distribution and display of a variable number of glyphs based on the location and size of these features. Using this technique Eikon generates images where important data features are displayed through variation in glyph density at one scale and where elementary details of data points are displayed via geometric variation in individual glyphs at another scale.
The generation and exploration of data views in Eikon is facilitated by an interactive visual programming environment. This allows images of the data to be quickly generated that focus on different aspects of the data. It also allows different images of the data to be generated using different glyphs or different bindings between data variables and glyph parameters. Additionally Eikon allows the number of glyphs displayed to be adjusted supporting various levels of detail and providing the necessary interactivity for visually exploring the data at multiple scales.
The thesis is concluded by describing the results of a visualization case study in which Eikon is shown to be a useful tool in the visualization of large multivariate data. The case study involves visualizing the results from a geophysical fluid dynamics simulation and demonstrates how Eikon can produce images similar to existing geometric coding methods, and also how several new images can be generated that focus on different user selected important attributes of the dataset. The case study shows how global overviews can be created and how various levels of detail views that show both global and more elementary information can be produced. At each step the utility of Eikon is illustrated through the advantages and disadvantages described by the case study participants.
Recommendations
EIKON: Teaching a high-school technology course with the aid of virtual reality
This paper presents EIKON, an integrated open educational environment used to support high-school technology courses. EIKON combines state-of-the-art information technologies, such as virtual reality, hypermedia and networking. Our pedagogical approach ...
A Model and Framework for Visualization Exploration
Visualization exploration is the process of extracting insight from data via interaction with visual depictions of that data. Visualization exploration is more than presentation; the interaction with both the data and its depiction is as important as ...
Browsing Zoomable Treemaps: Structure-Aware Multi-Scale Navigation Techniques
Treemaps provide an interesting solution for representing hierarchical data. However, most studies have mainly focused on layout algorithms and paid limited attention to the interaction with treemaps. This makes it difficult to explore large data sets ...