Visual Analysis Group

Visual Analysis Home

Visualization Tools and Environments


Below we discuss the tools we have applied in a variety of application areas.
Opal

Opal is a new visualization architecture which generalizes most of the concepts implemented in an earlier visualization library, Diamond. It is a scalable, distributable, and extensible system that performs very fast interactive visualization of potentially large amounts of virtual multidimensional and hierarchical tabular data. A major goal is to consume only minimal client resources, low server resources, and to use a minimally narrow communication path between the server and the client. It is implemented as a flexible JAVA toolkit for building a wide variety of interactive data applications with minimal programming. Read more about visualizing multidimensional data... Read more about Opal...
Diamond
Diamond is a visual data analysis package and a programmable environment that allows users to explore and manipulate tabular spreadsheet-like data. Its strength lies in its considerable variety of complementary graphical views available, and its dynamic interlinking of color. This approach enables easy and rapid interactive exploration of complex relationships in multivariate data. Key Features: Rich interactive capabilites with exceptional speed Direct manipulation of objects in the pictures Transforming variables Adding, defining, or joining new variables Coloring or otherwise selecting cases Sorting on characteristics of variables cases Boolean operations on sets of cases Complementary pictures, all inter-linked with each other: Color-coded data tables Tables of conventional and novel univariate and bivariate statistics Tables of categories of case values Pie charts Line graphs Histograms Parallel coordinates plots Parametric snake plots Variable similarity and case clustering dendograms Fractal Foam plots of bivariate statistics Arrays of plots Overlayed plots Context maps
WEAVE

	We have developed software enabling the rapid development of custom visualizations which combine 3D spatial representations (created using Data Explorer) with sophisticated statistical representations (created using Diamond) using ActiveX component technology. In addition to the project with Johns Hopkins University studying heart simulation data we have also applied WEAVE to CAD and demographic studies as shown here.