Hello everyone, the title of our paper is “IGScript: An Interaction Grammar for Scientific Data Presentation”.
The authors of this paper are Richen Liu, Min Gao, Shunlong Ye from Nanjing Normal University, and Jiang Zhang from Peking University.
Data story animation can be used to reveal the dynamic changes and evolution processes present in the time-varying scientific data
Building data story animation is challenging due to the lack of tools on flexibly customizing the animation contents,
viewpoints and steps, and its styles of transitions and shot changes
It is hard to customize set operator-based query expressions to generate a dynamic animation by using GUI or traditional interactions,
for example, as shown in the two figures. It is difficult to customize the complex query results by using traditional GUI operations.
In this paper, we propose IGScript, a script-driven and data-driven authoring tool based on interpretive grammars
to help users who are unfamiliar with programming to build scientific data presentation animations
We propose three design goals according to the requirements collected from the target users.
The video shows how to define ROIs in the linked view, i.e., the coding space view (left part) and the visualization space view (right part).
The linked view provides users with visual steering and visual feedback.
They are allowed to place and move an ROI box in the visualization space by coarse-grained tuning and then adjust position slightly in the coding space by fine-grained tuning.
We design two types of grammars, general-purpose grammars and application-specific grammars.
For more details about grammar design, please refer to our paper.
The first type is “General-purpose Grammars”, it includes some general functions which can be applied to different usage scenarios,
for example, defineROI is used to add an ROI box to the place where users are interested in,
such as the lesions in a medical data, data loading function is implemented like a C++ overloading function to support different data types in run-time.
Besides, there are some camera lens transformation functions such as rotate, translate, scale (zoom), parallel and the animation control functions animate and locate.
The second type is “Application-specific Grammars”
We conduct a user study to examine if non-experts and domain experts with limited programming skills could create their desired data presentation animations by IGScript.
We demonstrate the usability, customizability, and flexibility of IGScript by four usage scenarios such as 2-D scalar field data, 3-D scalar field data, vector field data, and diffusion tensor imaging data.
The first one is a 2-D scalar field data, which is a global carbon emission data.
The second usage scenario is used to customize data presentation animations for 3-D scalar field data.
It is easy to insert, remove and change ROIs, or even share the ROI list to other people.
The transitional scene switching across ROIs follows the shot change style in film photography.
The third usage scenario is to customize data presentation animations for time-varying vector field data.
We cluster the pathlines by OD queries to reduce visual clutter, different clusters can be tracked by different camera lens and then visualized in different views.
The final usage scenario is to customize data presentation animations for DTI fiber data.
We find it easy for users to reproduce a similar result to Chen’s work in IEEE VIS 2009 (top-left) without changing any rendering codes, as shown in the top figures.
We also demonstrate the expressiveness and effectiveness of IGScript by the customization of complex expression-based queries, as shown in the bottom-left four figures.
Here comes the discussion. There are some limitations of IGScript and we plan to address them in future work:
The supported data types of the current IGScript include four general types of scientific data according to “The Visualization Handbook” by Charles Hansen and Chris R. Johnson.
IGScript can be easily adapted to other use cases for these four general types of data.
However, regarding a new data type such as a data with a higher order tensor, the APIs on data loading and application-specific presentations should be added to the IGScripts library.
We also receive many constructive suggestions from the user study participants.
So, the conclusions of the work.
In this paper, we design an textual interaction grammar-based tool named IGScript, a novel script-based interaction grammar tool,
to help build scientific data presentation animations for communication, especially for the users who are unfamiliar with programming.
Finally, we would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and appreciate all the domain experts and user study participants.
This work was supported by the two following fundings.