01 Oct 2008

VisComplete: Automating Suggestions for Visualization Pipelines

David Koop, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Claudio T. Silva. IEEE TVCG 14(6):1691-1698, 2008 (Vis 2008).

Building visualization and analysis pipelines is a large hurdle in the adoption of visualization and workflow systems by domain scientists. In this paper, we propose techniques to help users construct pipelines by consensus, automatically suggesting completions based on a database of previously created pipelines. In particular, we compute correspondences between existing pipeline subgraphs from the database, and use these to predict sets of likely pipeline additions to a given partial pipeline. By presenting these predictions in a carefully designed interface, users can create visualizations and other data products more efficiently because they can augment their normal work patterns with the suggested completions. We present an implementation of our technique in a publicly-available, open-source scientific workflow system and demonstrate efficiency gains in real-world situations.

Get the paper in PDF Format (1.9MB).