Operator-centric design patterns for information visualization software

Design patterns have proven to be a useful means to make the process of designing, developing, and reusing software systems more efficient. In the area of information visualization, researchers have proposed design patterns for different functional components of the visualization pipeline. Since many visualization techniques need to display derived data as well as raw data, the data transformation stage is very important in the pipeline, yet existing design patterns are, in general, not sufficient to implement these data transformation techniques. In this paper, we propose two design patterns, operatorcentric transformation and data modifier, to facilitate the design of data transformations for information visualization systems. The key idea is to use operators to describe the data derivation and introduce data modifiers to represent the derived data. We also show that many interaction techniques can be regarded as operators as defined here, thus these two design patterns could suppor...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: VDA
• Authors: Zaixian Xie, Zhenyu Guo, Matthew O. Ward, Elke A. Rundensteiner
• Keywords: Data Modifiers, Data Transformations, Design Patterns, VDA 2010, Visualization