The PiVis Framework for Visualization of Digital Object Memories

Digital object memories, as a shared storage place for object-related information, support information reuse across domain and application boundaries throughout its whole life cycle. In this paper, we present a reusable general-purpose software framework for the visualization of and interaction with such digital object memories. The framework simplifies the implementation of applications which support end users based on information stored in object memories. Challenges arise from the open nature of object memories, where format and semantic of contained data is usually not known in advance. The framework applies plugins for visualization, data conversion and inferencing. A planning algorithm automatically constructs a data processing and visualization pipeline for each new object. Objects can become self-representative by providing their own plugins, which the framework dynamically integrates into the generated pipeline. We describe the framework architecture and give examples of three different systems implemented with our framework.