DEVise: an Environment for Data Exploration and Visualization

Table of Contents:

• Overview
• The DEVise JavaScreen
• Four Steps from Data to Visualization
• Features
• Examples
• In Depth
• Publications
• Related Work
• Release Information
• Documentation
• Contacts
• Support
• People
• Acknowledgments

DEVise (Data Exploration and Visualization) is a data exploration system that allows users to easily develop, browse, and share visual presentations of large tabular datasets (possibly containing or referencing multimedia objects) from several sources.

Our emphasis is on developing an intuitive yet powerful set of querying and visualization primitives that can be easily combined to develop a rich set of visual presentations that integrate data from a wide range of application domains.

The DEVise JavaScreen

The DEVise JavaScreen is a Java applet that allows much of the functionality of DEVise to be accessed via the Internet. Click here to see some applications of the JavaScreen and try it out for yourself.

Four Steps from Data to Visualization

Click here to find out how to import and visualize data in DEVise.

Features

These features distinguish DEVise from other visualization environments:

• Visual query interface: Visualizations constructed with one set of data may be saved and applied to other input data.
• Data larger than memory are efficiently handled.
• Mapping from data to graphics at record level. (e.g., you can control the color or shape of individual records.)
• Ability to query data records used to represent graphics.
• Flexible layout mechanisms within windows. It helps user group data together for comparison, or put the aside when not needed.
• Linked X, Y, or X and Y axes.
• Cursor helps compare the relationship between different views of the data.
• Record based input data.
• Direct input of ASCII files.
• Integer, float, date, and string data types.

Check out the following examples for some cool pictures, and a quick introduction to what DEVise can do.

• Bank Data
• Mideast Maps
• Mars Images
• Word Count Data using an Embedded Tk Window
• R-Tree Validation
• Molecular Biology (Cell Images)
• Soil Science/BIRCH Clustering
• Financial Data Exploration
• Family Medicine/National Climate Data Center
• Geographical Information System
• Soil Science
• File server
• Program Traces
• Clinical Sciences

• Model of Visualization
• Visual Query Interface
• Performance Issues

Christopher E. Weaver and Miron Livny. ``Improving Visualization Interactivity in Java'' Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Visual Data Exploration and Analysis, January, 2000, pp. 62-72.

Hongyu Yao, Kent Wenger, and Miron Livny. ``DEVise and the JavaScreen: Visualization on the Web'' Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Visual Data Exploration and Analysis, January, 2000, pp. 375-384.

Miron Livny, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Kevin Beyer, Guangshun Chen, Donko Donjerkovic, Shilpa Lawande, Jussi Myllymaki, and Kent Wenger.``DEVise: Integrated Querying and Visual Exploration of Large Datasets.'' Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD, May, 1997. The abstract of the demo session.

Karen L. Karavanic, Jussi Myllymaki, Miron Livny, and Barton P. Miller. ``Integrated Visualization of Parallel Program Performance Data.'' In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Environments and Tools for Parallel Scientific Computing, August, 1996.

Miron Livny, Raghu Ramakrishnan, and Jussi Myllymaki. ``Visual Exploration of Large Data Sets.'' In Proceedings of the IS&T/SPIE Conference on Visual Data Exploration and Analysis, January, 1996.

Michael Cheng, Miron Livny, and Raghu Ramakrishnan. ``Visual Analysis of Stream Data.'' In Proceedings of the IS&T/SPIE Conference on Visual Data Exploration and Analysis, February, 1995.

Raghu Ramakrishnan, Michael Cheng, Miron Livny, and Praveen Seshadri, ``What's next? Sequence queries.'' In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Management of Data (COMAD), December, 1994.

Release Information

The most current released version of DEVise is version 1.11.0.

If you're a University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences user, or someone else with access to the /afs/cs.wisc.edu AFS cell you can run DEVise 1.11.0 from /p/devise/release.

To run DEVise 1.11.0 from /p/devise/release click here.

If you don't have access to /afs/cs.wisc.edu, you need to download DEVise to run it.

DEVise 1.11.0 executables are available for the following architectures:

• i386/RHEL 5
• x86_65/Centos 5

Here is a copy of the DEVise documentation (in PostScript). (Note that this documentation is not fully up-to-date.)

Contacts

Last updated 2010-07-21.