A Web Services Architecture for Visualization

Abstract

Abstract-Service-oriented architectures are increasingly being used as the architectural style for creating large distributed computer applications. This paper examines the provision of visualization as a service that can be made available to application designers in order to combine with other services. We develop a three-layer architecture: a client layer which provides the user interface; a stateful web service middleware layer which provides a published interface to the visualization system; and finally, a visualization component layer which provides the core functionality of visualization techniques. This separation of middleware from the visualization components is crucial: it allows us to exploit the strengths of web service technologies in providing standardized access to the system, and in maintaining state information throughout a session, but also gives us the freedom to build our visualization layer in an efficient and flexible way without the constraints of web service protocols.We describe the design of a visualization service based on this architecture, and illustrate one aspect of the work by re-visiting an early example of webbased visualization.

Visualization of Real-World Web Services Based on Fuzzy Logic

“…For consumer side applications, not so many visualization projects have been developed. Working examples include the ManyEyes [14] system, which allows registered users to upload datasets and select from a number of pre-defined applets [22]. A Web 2.0 social networking aspect is added by allowing users to upload their visualizations, with comments added, to a repository from where other users can download the visualization, append their own comments and perhaps make changes.…”

Protovis: A Graphical Toolkit for Visualization

“…The web offers many possibilities for system architectures, ranging from thin clients running natively in the browser [9,20] to "fat servers" where most computation occurs on the server, and hybrid approaches in-between [2,38]. Our approach is partly agnostic to system architecture: while our initial implementation uses a thin client approach, the declarative specification is portable to other rendering engines (e.g., Java 2D, Flash), and data transformations and parts of the display could potentially be performed on the server.…”

Création et évaluation d’interfaces visuelles interactives à partir de services web

“…en un service web, avec de simples notions élémentaires de Java ou de C++. Ce type d'approche (wrapping) existe déjà pour des bibliothèques et plateformes de visualisation VTK (Gao, Chen, 2007), IRIS EXPLORER (Walton, 2004) et AD-VISE (Wood et al, 2008). Notre approche se différencie par sa simplicité et sa généri-cité à tout programme exécutable et tout type de source de données (l'API (Scuturici, 2009) a une implémentation en Java qui fonctionne sous WINDOWS, LINUX et MA-COS).…”