Kenneth Charles Cox

Mawl: a domain-specific language for form-based services

A form-based service is one in which the flow of data between service and user is described by a sequence of query/response interactions, or forms. Mawl is a domain-specific language for programming form-based services in a device-independent manner. We focus on Mawls form abstraction, which is the means for separating service logic from user interface description, and show how this simple abstraction addresses seven issues in service creation, analysis, and maintenance: compile-time guarantees, implementation flexibility, rapid prototyping, testing and validation, support for multiple devices, composition of services, and usage analysis.

3D geographic network displays

Many types of information may be represented as graphs or networks with the nodes corresponding to entities and the links to relationships between entities. Often there is geographical information associated with the network. The traditional way to visualize geographical networks employs node and link displays on a two-dimensional map. These displays are easily overwhelmed, and for large networks become visually cluttered and confusing. To overcome these problems we have invented five novel network views that generalize the traditional displays. Two of the views show the complete network, while the other three concentrate on a portion of a larger network defined by connectivity to a given node. Our new visual metaphors retain many of the well-known advantages of the traditional network maps, while exploiting three-dimensional graphics to address some of the fundamental problems limiting the scalability of two-dimensional displays.

Case study: 3D displays of Internet traffic

The explosive growth in world-wide communications, especially the Internet, has highlighted the need for techniques to visualize network traffic. The traditional node and link network displays work well for small datasets but become visually cluttered and uninterpretable for large datasets. A natural 3D metaphor for displaying world-wide network data is to position the nodes on a globe and draw arcs between them coding the traffic. This technique has several advantages of over the traditional 2D displays, it naturally reduces line crossing clutter, provides an intuitive model for navigation and indication of time, and retains the geographic context. Coupling these strengths with some novel interaction techniques involving the globe surface translucency and arc heights illustrates the usefulness for this class of displays.

A Multi-Modal Natural Language Interface to an Information Visualization Environment

Domain experts frequently know what questions they want to ask about a data set, but they do not necessarily know the mechanisms of using an information visualization (infoVis) system for investigating these inquiries of interest. In our work, we are researching the addition of a natural language (NL) interface for bridging this gap between NL questions and data exploration within an infoVis environment. In this paper, we present our approach to integrating an NL interface into an existing infoVis system. We illustrate the power of combining direct manipulation with NL interfaces, and we provide a real-life example of applying our approach to the analysis of a large, complex data set.

Interactive visualization of multiway tables

Many business data visualization applications involve large databases with dozens of fields and millions of rows. Interactive visualization of these databases is difficult because of the large amount of data involved. We present a method of summarizing large databases which is well suited to interactive visualization. We illustrate this with a visualization tool for the domain of call billing data.

Using dialog and context in a speech-based interface for an information visualization environment

We describe a speech-based interface to an information visualization (infoVis) system. Users ask natural-language questions about a given data domain. Our interface then maps the questions into infoVis operations, which result in the display of data visualizations that address the questions. Users can interact with these views via speech or direct manipulation. If users give incomplete information, our interface guides them in clarifying their questions. The intelligence behind our interface is encapsulated in a service logic that embodies domain knowledge about both the data being explored and the infoVis system. This allows users to focus on answering questions, rather than on the mechanics of accessing data and creating views.