An Extended Framework for Visualizing the Data from Both Local Databases
and Semantic Web Databases
Wei Shi, Bin Piao and Yuzuru Tanaka
Meme Media Laboratory, Hokkaido University
West8. North13, Kita-ku, Sapporo Hokkaido, Japan
{shiwei, piaobin, tanaka}@meme.hokudai.ac.jp
ABSTRACT
Many modern visualization frameworks support
users to declaratively define charts by their logical
specifications. But these systems do not support the
declarative definition of nonstandard charts. To
solve this problem, we proposed a new visualization
framework. Users can use it to declaratively define
both standard charts and nonstandard charts from
their logical specifications. 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 retrieving and
processing data. Each CVS is used for defining the
appearance of each chart component and defining
how to use graphical objects to represent data.
Because the rapid development of Semantic Web,
we further extend our visualization framework to
support users to exploratorily search Semantic Web
through a node in the DVS. By manipulating the
DVS, users can define a view of Semantic Web
Resources. Users can also further manipulate this
generated DVS to integrate the data from local
databases and those from Semantic Web, and then
visualize the integrated data with either a standard
or a nonstandard chart.
KEYWORDS
Data Visualization, Hierarchical Data Schema,
Hierarchical Visualization Schema, Exploratory
Search of Semantic Web Resources, View of
Semantic Web Resources, Data Set Integration
1 INTRODUCTION
Database visualization is a widely-used
technology which supports users to represent
data by visual properties of a set of graphical
objects in a chart. By observing such kinds of
charts, users may obtain the information which
may be difficult to obtain from the original data.
Because the development of data gathering
technologies, multivariate data sets become
popular. How to create user-customized charts
to effectively visualize such kind of data sets
becomes necessary. We classify all the charts
into two categories, i.e., standard charts and
nonstandard charts.
A basic standard chart denotes such a chart
composed using four types of basic graphical
objects, i.e., “Point”, “Line”, “Area” and
“Interval”. A standard chart is either a basic
standard chart, or a chart composed with more
than one standard charts by geometrically
arranging them or embedding some of them
into another in a nested way. A chart that is not
a standard chart as defined above is a
nonstandard chart.
In our research [1], we proposed a new
visualization framework. Users can use it to
declaratively define various charts by their
logical specifications. By using our framework,
users can separately retrieve and process the
data, and define how to visualize the result data
by manipulating two kinds of tree-structured
schemata. By manipulating these two schemata,
users can define both standard and nonstandard
charts.
When someone reads a chart, he may want to
know some further information related to this
chart. The data from the local database which is
used to define this chart may not include their
desired information. He may often need to
search the web to further gather his desired
information.
ISBN: 978-1-941968-02-4 ©2014 SDIWC 76
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics, Multimedia and Image Processing, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2014