GADGET: goal-oriented application design guidance for modular visualization environments

Modular visualization environments (MVEs) have recently been regarded as the de facto standard for scientific data visualization, mainly due to adoption of the visual programming style, reusability, and extendability. However, since scientists and engineers as the MVE principal user are not always familiar with how to map numerical data to proper graphical primitives, the set of built-in modules is not fully used to construct necessary application networks. Therefore, a certain mechanism needs to be incorporated into MVEs, which makes use of heuristics and expertise of visualization specialists (visineers), and which supports the user in designing his/her applications with MVEs. The Wehrend's goal-oriented taxonomy of visualization techniques is adopted as the basic philosophy to develop a system, called GADGET, for application design guidance for MVEs. The GADGET system interactively helps the user design appropriate applications according to the specific visualization goals, temporal efficiency versus accuracy requirements, and such properties as dimension and mesh type of a given target dataset. Also the GADGET system is capable of assisting the user in customizing a prototype modular network for his/her desired applications by showing execution examples involving datasets of the same type. The paper provides an overview of the GADGET guidance mechanism and system architecture, with an emphasis on its knowledge base design. Sample data visualization problems are used to demonstrate the usefulness of the GADGET system.