VizDSL is a visual domain-specific language that allows non-IT experts to quickly create interactive visualizations. It extends the IFML language to include visualization concepts. VizDSL's metamodel includes concepts for data, layouts, themes, and interactions. The authors implemented VizDSL to visualize complex standards like ISO15926 and evaluated it against requirements for semantic visualization, ease-of-use for non-programmers, and support for interoperability standards. Future work includes user studies and expanding VizDSL's capabilities.
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1. VizDSL: A Visual DSL for
Interactive Information
Visualization
AUTHORS: REBECCA MORGAN, GEORG GROSSMANN, MICHAEL SCHREFL,
MARKUS STUMPTNER, TIMOTHY PAYNE
ORGANISATION: KSE LAB, ADVANCED COMPUTING RESEARCH CENTRE,
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA; LOCKHEED MARTIN STELARLAB
2. VizDSL
o A platform-independent and extensible modelling
language which allows non-IT experts to describe, model
and create interactive visualizations, quickly and easily.
o Extends IFML; allows users to model and execute
visualization process including interactions and navigation.
3. Challenges and problems
Semantic visualization using MDE
o Integration and interoperability -> MDE -> DSL.
o Visualization of complex semantic information in terms of entities, relationships and hierarchical
structures -> consider XML.
o Visualization of underlying structure (schema) as well as instances.
Creating complex interactive visualizations
oProcedural visualization approach: visualization structure and interactions have to be
inferred directly from code e.g. D3.
oVisualization software packages: visualization creation is “black box” e.g. Tableau.
Standards-based interoperability
oSystem-of-systems interoperability: visualization solution must remain independent while
able to act in concert with other systems.
oStandards: employed to ensure common grounds for information exchange.
4. Industry Requirements
Case study
oCollected from Oil and Gas Interoperability pilot.
R1: Semantic visualization using MDE
o There is a need for a graphical DSL which can be used to model and implement interactive
visualizations. This DSL should be able to visualise complex information such as that contained in
ISO15926 and should be able to visualise schema as well as data content.
R2: Creating complex interactive visualizations without programming experience
o There is a need for a visualization DSL which can be used by non-IT experts to quickly and easily
create highly interactive visualizations which are customised to suit the user.
R3: Support for standards-based interoperability
o There is a need for a visualization DSL which can be employed as part of a heterogeneous system
of interoperable components, and which should be based on a standard to increase its adoption.
5. Contributions
Background
oUnderstanding and mapping complex information structures.
oHow to cater for users with wide variety of expertise and experience?
oPrevious work introducing VizDSL1
Description
◦ Detailed metamodel of VizDSL.
◦ Capacity for visual representation of information over different levels; entities, attributes and
relationships.
Implementation
◦ Application of VizDSL to case study taken from OGI Pilot.
Evaluation
◦ Based on visual patterns identified by Heer and Agrawala2 .
◦ Also evaluated against requirements.
6. What is VizDSL?
Graphical DSL for visualization
◦ Can be used to model and execute interactive visualizations.
◦ Based on IFML standard.
IFML
◦ Domain specific modelling language used to model content,
user interactions and controls for application front ends.
VizDSL
◦ Extends IFML with domain-specific visualization concepts with
domain-specific data and visualization concepts.
oCommon: Parameter, ParameterBinding,
ParameterBindingGroup, ViewElement, ViewComponentPart,
Event, Action, ViewComponent and ActionEvent.
oExtensions: Data, Layout, Theme, Menu, Shape, MenuItem,
Element, Edge, Interaction, and Animation. VizDSL visual syntax
8. Case Study: Open Industrial
Interoperability Ecosystem (OIIE)
What is the OIIE?
◦ Physical asset management in asset-intensive industries.
◦ Supplier neutral industrial interoperability ecosystem employing system-of systems interoperability
◦ Uses a solutions architecture framework which employs a portfolio of selected standards
◦ Oil and Gas Interoperability (OGI) Pilot: public collaborative test-bed for the OIIE in oil and gas.
Digital information handover
◦ Important for operations and maintenance
◦ Standards based -> complex, difficult to understand
Interactive visualisation
◦ Can be used to allow non-IT personnel to quickly and efficiently gain understanding
Problems and challenges
o Non-IT users e.g. engineers in design domain need to quickly and easily create customised interactive visualizations
of complex standards specifications.
o Visualization tool must support semantic visualization (schema and instances), based on accepted standards for
interoperability, should not require programming expertise (non-IT users), should be reusable and easy to
communicate
USPI
9. Case study: Visualizing ISO15926
Implementation
◦ Roassal visualization engine, written in Smalltalk, implemented in Pharo or VisualWorks
◦ Originally developed for visual analytics of software systems, uses object-oriented approach to
visualization
◦ Smalltalk: everything is an object, including classes, which can send and receive messages
◦ Strong support for interactions, animation and web browser integration; highly customisable
◦ Chosen as visualization library because it is flexible, powerful and integrates easily with meta-
modelling tool, the Domain Modelling Environment (DoME)
◦ Can provide editing functions through user interaction with visualization
◦ ISO15926 ontology mapped to Smalltalk classes
12. Discussion and Evaluation
o Semantic visualization using MDE techniques
o VizDSL was used to model and execute interactive visualization of complex information contained in ISO15926
standard to demonstrate capabilities.
o Creating complex interactive visualizations without programming experience
o Advantages of IFML transferred to VizDSL as an extension of IFML
o IFML was designed for web development community which is multidisciplinary; covers a broad spectrum of IT
and non-IT skills similar to our target audience
o Design principles behind IFML which support model usability and understandability (conciseness, extensibility,
implementability, reusability) transferred to VizDSL as an extension of IFML
o Support for standards-based interoperability
o VizDSL models can be connected to other models describing system structure e.g. VizDSL model can be
connected to UML class diagram to visualize software system structure
o If it can be represented as an entity or object with attributes and relationships with other entities, then it can
be visualized using VizDSL
o Design patterns
o Discussion of how VizDSL applies to software design patterns for information visualization identified by Heer
and Agrawala2 available in paper
13. Conclusion and Future Work
oFurther work:
◦ User studies planned with users taken from the OGI Pilot and Lockheed Martin
◦ Still under construction
◦ Feedback used to refine and extend VizDSL metamodel
◦ More work on user interface
◦ Code generation using range of visualization libraries: Roassal, D3
◦ Lockheed Martin project: visualizing open source frameworks e.g. DDF, LASAGNE
• VizDSL provides a novel approach for creation and execution of interactive
visualizations through the development of a visual domain specific modelling language
14. Acknowledgements
Rebecca Morgan was supported by the Australian Government
Research Training Program Scholarship and by Lockheed Martin
Australia.
References
1. Morgan, R., Grossmann, G., Stumptner, M.: VizDSL: Towards a graphical
visualisation language for enterprise systems interoperability. In: Proc. Of
Symposium on Big Data Visual Analytics (BDVA), IEEE (2017)
2. Heer, J., Agrawala, M.: Software Design Patterns for Information
Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
12(5) (2006) 853 - 860
To give everyone a brief overview of the goal of the proposed research: we have developed a visualisation tool which has been designed to facilitate software system integration and interoperability, in the form of a domain specific language which we are calling VizDSL.
VizDSL is a graphical modelling language which extends UML and will allow people to model and execute the entire visualisation process, including user interactions and navigation. This tool is used to implement interactive visualisations which will allow non-IT users to quickly and efficiently gain understanding of complex information structures.
Here we have a brief overview of some of the industry challenges and problems which are motivating our research.
Why are we doing this? Software system integration and interoperability poses significant challenges when you’re looking at large, complex, heterogeneous software systems.
One example lies in the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem, which we’ll look at later.
Model driven engineering is a way of responding to these challenges by raising the abstraction level and focusing on the model as the primary driver behind the software engineering process. Domain specific languages are a fundamental tool in model driven engineering and allow us to represent a domain concisely and efficiently.
So, the aim is to bring all of this together and apply it to visualization.
We want to support software system integration and interoperability and to do so, we’ve created a graphical DSL, which can be used to design and implement interactive visualisations which will fit into the MDE framework and which will allow non-expert users to quickly and efficiently gain understanding of large, complex, distributed systems.
A major challenge lies in understanding the kinds of complex information which describes and is produced by modern operational systems. For example, consider how ubiquitous XML has become. XML is excellent for interoperability between varying systems, but it isn’t very easy for humans to understand.
Visualization of this complex data is generally required for human understanding. Given how big this data can become, as well as the variety of sources it’s obtained from and the complexity of the systems which it represents, interactive visualization is a great way of increasing understanding and reducing cognitive load.
There are some challenges in creating interactive visualizations. There are plenty of great visualization tools on the market, which can produce very attractive visualizations, which tend to come in the form of textual programming language, such as the D3 library, or as software packages, such as Tableau. The procedural approach requires some programming expertise, and the structure of the visualization and user interactions have to be inferred directly from the code. With the software packages, the visualization creation process is a black box.
Additional challenges lie in the fact that for architectures employing system-of-systems interoperability, the visualization solution has to be independent while still able to share information with other systems. In this situation, standards are employed so that there are common grounds for information exchange.
These industry requirements have been collected from our case study from the Oil and Gas Interoperability Pilot, which I’ll discuss in more detail later in the presentation.
So we’ve identified that there is an industry need for a graphical DSL which can be used to model and implement interactive visualizations, which can visualize semantic structures in terms of entities, attributes and relationships, as well as the data described in these semantic structures. So in other words, the DSL needs to be able to create complex visualizations of complex content including information structures such as XML schema, as well as data content or instances.
We’ve also identified the need for a visualization tool which can be quickly and easily used by non-programmers, to create customised, reusable, highly interactive visualizations. This requirement comes from the fact that the end users tend to be experts in domains other than IT and visualization, for example, design engineers. They tend to be familiar with creating models, however, they don’t necessarily have programming skills.
And finally, we’ve identified that this DSL needs to support standards-based interoperability, so it needs to be based on existing standards and capable of being employed as part of a heterogeneous system of interoperable components.
We have published some work introducing VizDSL earlier, but these points here are the significant contributions.
So, we’re dealing with understanding and mapping complex structures, with a wide variety of user expertise and experience.
We’ve identified that there are gaps in existing languages, in that there are no standard-based graphical modelling languages which can be used to design and implement interactive visualisations.
Existing languages tend to be textual, so a certain amount of user coding experience is required and the structure of the visualisation has to be inferred from the code.
Tools with graphical user interfaces have less of a learning curve, however, they tend to be limited to specific domains or they are strongly data-based, with little support for visualisation of information.
At this point, some of you might be wondering what the point of this process is; what is the difference between this DSL and any standard graphical interface for the typical procedural visualisation language.
Basically, we’re creating a visualisation tool which can be used to model the entire visualisation process, so, not just defining chart types and allocating element colors and all of the other things that your typical visualisation application already does very well.
VizDSL is a way of producing a graphical representation of not just the static visualisation structures, but the user interactions, the flow of the navigation process through the different parts of the visualisation, so you can see the big picture at a glance.
VizDSL will be more useful for people who want to represent semantic information, so this is a way of mapping visual entities to basically anything else which can be formally represented as an entity, with attributes and relationships.
This will make it easier to design interactive visualisations which are better at storytelling, and just as importantly, will make it much, much easier to share information about your visualisation structure, how users can interact with it, how you can navigate through your visualisation. Especially in terms of visual navigation through hierarchical structures.
We describe an application of VizDSL using a real life case study.
On the right, there’s a diagram showing the basic visual syntax for VizDSL.
We have based our DSL on the Interaction Flow Modelling Language, or IFML for short.
IFML is a graphical domain specific modelling language used to model content, user interactions and controls for application front ends.
IFML was recently accepted as a standard by the OMG and it’s well established through it’s predecessor, WebML.
IFML can be extended through it’s UML specification.
Graphical modelling languages are considered more accessible than textual languages, especially for inexperienced users.
It’s not straightforward to extend IFML to achieve what we want, for a number of reasons, like complex visualisation structures, the need to represent concepts which are specific to the visualisation domain, more complex visualisation navigation requirements.
Here’s the class model for VizDSL, classes in black are based on the corresponding IFML classes with extended attributes, classes in red have been modified from IFML and classes in green are the VizDSL extensions.
We’ve introduced a new class for data handling, which is used to represent the data being visualized. This data provides the model which is represented by a visual attribute. ViewContainers provide the canvas which is used to display visual elements.
Elements are the visual representation of a given object, so elements contain a Shape, which is applied to an object model representing the data.
Edges are the visual representation of the relationship between elements, they also contain a shape, and are mapped from one element to another.
Layouts are applied to elements, themes are stylesheets applied to viewcontainers.
We have interactions and animations. Interactions are highly customisable, you can define your own interactions. Interactions can be mapped directly to visual elements, such as a popup showing details about an object when you mouse over it or they can be used to change the nature or appearance of objects. Menus are used for interactions which are not associated with a visible element.
To really provide an understanding of what we’re trying to achieve, I’d like to introduce a real life case study to provide the context for this paper.
The KSE lab is heavily involved with the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem, or the OIIE for short.
The OIIE is a supplier neutral solutions architecture framework which is aimed at asset-intensive industries, such as the integrated energy industry and the defense industry.
The OIIE employs system of systems interoperability.
The OIIE follows a standards-based approach to interoperability, so industries involved use agreed upon standards for information exchange.
These standards have been selected according to industry requirements, adoption levels and community engagement.
The Oil and Gas Interoperability Pilot is an instance of the OIIE.
The OGI Pilot provides a public collaborative test-bed for the OIIE in the oil and gas industry.
An area of interest is in digital information handover, so, for example the transfer of design documents from engineering staff to operations and maintenance staff.
In the case of the OGI Pilot, businesses in the design domain prefers the ISO15926 standard, while on the operation and maintenance side, MIMOSA is preferred.
The information contained in these standards is complex and difficult to communicate.
So here, we have a very small part of the information contained in the ISO15926 standard, which is used by businesses in the design domain in the OGI Pilot.
On the left, there is a very small part of the formal logical specifications for entities described in the ISO15926 standard.
There are more than 400 pages contained in the different parts of the standard, so as you can imagine, it is no small task to get a good understanding of what’s going on in there.
As part of the information handover process, the information contained in ISO15926 has to be mapped to the standards employed by the operations and maintenance domain.
Obviously, this is no small task and an early requirement in this process is to gain a solid understanding of the information contained in the standards.
This is where interactive visualisation comes in, since it can be used to help non-IT staff, such as design engineers, to quickly and efficiently gain understanding of this complex standard-based information, which is obviously necessary when they are passing information between different areas of expertise.
For the implementation described in the paper, we’ve been using Agile Visualisation.
Agile Visualisation uses the Roassal visualisation engine, which is written in Smalltalk and implemented in Pharo, which is the open source environment or in Visualworks, which is the commercial environment. We use visualworks.
Agile visualisation was originally developed for visual analysis of software systems.
Agile Visualisation uses an object-oriented approach to visualisation.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Smalltalk, the language which Agile Visualisation is written in, everything is an object, which is an instance of a class and classes are also objects. Basically everything occurs by passing messages between objects.
So, in Agile Visualisation, visualisation elements, structures, interactions, are all objects which can be manipulated using messages.
Agile Visualisation has strong support for interactivity, animation and web browser integration out of the box, you can export directly to HTML and associated javascript file, which simplifies web integration considerably.
Agile Visualisation was chosen because it’s very flexible, powerful and has been relatively easy to integrate with our meta-modelling tool, the domain modelling environment, otherwise known as dome.
As well as supporting user interactions on a relatively simple level, like zooming, highlighting, details on demand, we’re also looking at providing editing functions by direct interaction with the visualisation, so for example, someone can create a new data entity by clicking on a button.
We’ve got an example of a VizDSL diagram here, showing a fairly basic interactive visualization of the ISO15926 hierarchy, so at a glance, you can see that there’s one view, with 4 menus, one data source, and two direct interactions with the view, in this case popups and element selection. The elements represent the classes in the hierarchy and we’ve got edges from an elements superclass to itself.
This visualization was created using the VizDSL model we saw a few slides back. So, we’ve got these colored ovals or elements, representing entities in the ISO15926 standard, colored individually. You can choose to create a palette which associates a given data model with a particular color. Relationships between elements are represented using edges, which in this case are lines from an element to it’s superclass. We also have a few menus, including a drill-down navigational menu, so you can select an element and click on the menu to view it’s children, a theme changer, a layout changer and a find menu. This is a pretty basic visualization, in the next slide, I’ll show a video with some more complex visualizations using the same ISO15926 hierarchy.
So, evaluation. We’ve been able to meet our requirements, in that we’ve successfully modelled and executed interactive visualizations of the complex ISO15926 standard.
One of the primary drivers behind the development of VizDSL is the need for non-IT experts to quickly and easily create complex interactive visualizations and as such, understandability is of fundamental importance. IFML, on which VizDSL is based on, was designed for the web development community, which is multidisciplinary and covers a broad spectrum of IT and non-IT skills [24], similar to our target audience. The design principles behind IFML which support model usability and understandability (conciseness, extensibility, implementability, reusability, default modelling patterns and details) is transferred to VizDSL as an extension of IFML, so, briefly, we’ve leveraged the advantages of IFML as a means of quickly and easily representing user interactions and navigational flow
And we’ve provided support for standards-based interoperability, by creating a language which is based on an accepted standard, which can be connected to models described using for example UML or basically anything else which represents content and then visualize it. Although we’ve described an implementation using Smalltalk, VizDSL is platform-independent.
