A New Database Visualization Framework for the Automatic Construction of Non-standard Charts: Re-creating the Chart of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812

Abstract

In the last decade, research on database visualization has made great progress in automatically constructing charts composed of standard primitive charts. The next research challenge is to automatically construct non-standard charts which cannot be simply composed with standard primitive types of charts. One typical example is the chart of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. As to the challenge of automatic construction of such complex charts, we may classify conventional visualization frameworks into two categories. The first category asks users to procedurally define non-standard charts by programming. The second category asks users to declaratively define non-standard charts with their logical specification using a given library of graphical objects. Here we will propose a new visualization framework in the second category for automatically constructing non-standard charts from their logical specifications and discuss how to apply our framework to create custom-made geovisualization charts. Such a specification is described by one or more pairs of data view schemata (DVSs) and chart view schemata (CVSs). Each DVS is used for manipulating the data store in a database. Each CVS is used for defining the rendered appearances of the different chart components. Using our framework, users can easily re-create and extend such complex non-standard charts as the chart of Napoleon's campaign by simply providing their logical specifications.