VisBubbles: A Workflow-Driven Framework for Scientific Data Analysis

彬彬

1 Introduction

Our long-term collaborations with bat flight biologists have revealed

that several workflow issues continue to be persistent barriers

in scientists’ data analysis tasks. Only limited attention has

been given to user interfaces that bridge programming and visualization

in environments involving multiple information resources,

feature extraction by programming, and analytic study. We present

VisBubbles (Fig. 1), a unified environment supporting programming,

visualization, and interaction concurrently for data analysis

workflow. The framework was developed in a participatory design

process and discussion with biologists continues to provide new insights

into general-purpose support for data-analysis workflow.

2 Design Analysis

Our long-term collaboration with bat biologists has revealed two

workflow design issues. The first is that visual interfaces have not

provided enough support in the dynamic data analysis process.

The biologists’ analytic process is dynamic, not static. That the path

of their exploration is often unpredictable imposes several design

requirements. They need easy access to a tremendous amount of

data to reason through their analysis, and they need an interface

that supports their multiple diverse and simultaneous tasks.

The second issue is that program implementation and data analysis

are conducted in multiple separate working environments.

Evolutionary biologists use Matlab to conduct analysis and then

program the results into visualizations for confirmation or generation

of new hypotheses. If more analysis is needed, they switch

back toMatlab to make changes. Switching back and forth between

Matlab and the visualization process introduces significant context

switching consts.

3 Our Methods and Preliminary Results

We addressed these issues in the design of VisBubbles, that has two

key design apsects. One key aspect of VisBubbles is its extension

of static multiple views to a metaphorical interface of bubbles that

becomes a flexible layout to support analysis, motivated by the recent

success of integrated development environment in Code Bubbles

[Bragdon et al. 2010]. Unlike windows, bubbles do not overlap

but instead push each other out of the way, thus supporting simultaneous

side-by-side comparison and freeing users from the windows

arrangement, so they can focus on their analytical tasks. Bubbles

can be moved freely in space to leverage the action sequence of

the data analysis process (considering humans’ limited mnemonic

abilities of 7 ± 2 items). Bubbles can also be grouped to form a

flexible multiple view environments. When grouped, data are automatically

linked to support interactive queries in such a way that

interacting in one view activates the same interactions in all other

grouped views.

e-mail: zgpan@cad.zju.edu.cn

†e-mail: jian.chen@usm.edu

1

2

3

5

6

4

8

7

9

11

12

10

Figure 1: VisBubbles interface. An example visual interface that a

biologist can build using VisBubbles, which contains (1) a virtual

work space and the following bubbles: (2) geometry, (3) compar-

ison plot, (4) parallel coordinates, (5) video, (6) note-taking, (7)

data source manager, (8) sketch bubbles for shape fitting, (9) web

bubbles, (10)Matlab programming bubbles, (11) 2D plots, and (12)

authorized data.

In a nutshell, biologists would look at all information to determine

which hypothesis is worth consideration. VisBubbles lets the users

load datasets of interest by composing the data (item 7 left) and

the good default visualizations (item 7 right) by direct dragging. A

new bubble pops up to show a visualization, e.g., as a mesh view

(Figure 1 (2)) or plots. By doing so, the interface supports presentation

of information of heterogeneous types. VisBubbles extends

the metaphor of bubbles [Bragdon et al. 2010] in that each bubble

represents a function unit that is valid for programming and can be

interpreted to create a visualization. Here each visualization is created

by a certain data type, e.g., spatial wing data are shown as a

three-dimensional (3D) mesh.

Another key aspect is the pipeline approach that combines programming

and interaction in such a way that newly authorized data can

be visualized without leaving the data analysis environment. Any

parameters derived from the Matlab can be placed in the authorized

data bubble (Figure 1(12)), which can also be composed with the

good default visualizations (Figure 1(7) right) to see newly authorized

data (Figure 1(11)). Biologists who used our interface reported

that our interface externalized the data analysis sequence by

presenting presentation, rather than hiding the query process, which

could aid more effective data analysis and student training.

References

BRAGDON, A., REISS, S., ZELEZNIK, R., KARUMURI, S., CHEUNG,

W., KAPLAN, J., COLEMAN, C., ADEPUTRA, F., AND

LAVIOLA JR, J. 2010. Code bubbles: rethinking the user

interface paradigm of integrated development environments.

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering,

455–464.

晃晃

都闪开，介个帖子，偶来顶

奇

跑着去顶朋友滴铁

奇

赞一个，哈哈

tc

有意思！学习了！

C.R.CAN

都闪开，介个帖子，偶来顶

菜刀吻电线

佩服，好多阿 ，哈哈

C.R.CAN

路过、路过、快到鸟，列位请继续...ing

tc

其实楼主所说的这些，俺支很少用！

C.R.CAN

很经典，很实用，学习了!