Current Projects
Exploring the Role of Web 2.0 in Software Engineering
Visualization of Biomedical Ontologies
Software Visualization
Software Peer Reviews
Visual Data Analysis for InfoVis Novices
Past Projects
Exploring the Role of Web 2.0 in Software Engineering
ICD-11
The International Classification of Diseases, developed by the World Health Organization, is currently undergoing the long process of its 11th revision (ICD-11). The aim is to incite broad collaboration among experts and stakeholders in a transparent authoring process. Along with this goal come many challenges for tool support. Working with the Stanford University iCAT team, we are gathering requirements for the construction of a collaborative authoring tool that facilitaties the argumentation and editing process of the world’s largest medical ontology.
Primary researcher: Gargi Bougie
Partners: World Health Organization
ConcernLines
ConcernLines supports the cognitive process of understanding software evolution by visualizing co-occurring concerns over time. Understanding the evolution of a software system requires understanding how information about the release history, non-functional requirements and project milestones relates to functional requirements on the software components. ConcernLines presents a timeline view of all these concerns and allows the identification of co-occurrences. Currently, the tool exists as Web Application developed in Adobe's Flex.
Primary researcher: Christoph Treude
Partners: IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, Ottawa
Tagging and Emergent Value in Jazz
Our research on IBM's Jazz focuses on how developers use social computing technologies such as tagging in their daily work.
Primary researcher: Christoph Treude
Partners: IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, Ottawa
TagSEA
Tags for Software Engineering Activities (TagSEA) combines social tagging with the idea of geographical waypointing to offer a lightweight way to mark and navigate through points of interest in software engineering projects.
Primary researchers: Jody Ryall, Del Myers, and John Anvik
Partners: IBM Eclipse Innovation Grant & Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Work Item Explorer
WorkItemExplorer is an interactive environment to visually explore data from software development tasks. WorkItemExplorer enables developers and managers to investigate trends and correlations in their task management system by making data exploration flexible and interactive, and by utilizing multiple coordinated views. Our preliminary evaluation shows that WorkItemExplorer is able to answer questions that developers ask, while also enabling them to gain new insights through the free exploration of data.
Primary researcher: Christoph Treude
Partners: IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, Ottawa
Visualization of Biomedical Ontologies
Bio-Mixer
Bio-Mixer is a web-based environment that supports the flexible exploration of biomedical ontologies. The concepts in the ontologies and their mappings can be explored in different views such as graph views, lists and timeline views. Drag-and-drop interaction can be used to show items and collections in different views, to create filtered views and to synchronize selections. Bio-Mixer enhances drag and drop with a new drop target highlighting and preview approach to make working with multiple collections and views easy. Bio-Mixer also provides support for ontology annotation and workspace sharing between collaborators.
Primary researcher: Lars Grammel
Partners: National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO)
FlexViz
FlexViz is a graph based visualization tool written in Adobe Flex. It allows users to browse a single ontology where the concepts are represented by nodes and the relationships between concepts (e.g. "is_a", "part-of") are represented as arcs. It has support for node and arc type filtering, built-in searching, many different graph layouts, zooming, and much more.
Primary developer: Chris Callendar
Partners: National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO)
Diver
Understanding the engineering behind modern software can be a great challenge. Programs today consist of millions of lines of code, spread over thousands of files. Even with access to source code, there are many barriers to meaningful comprehension of even small parts of the software. Our Diver tools and techniques to help alleviate those problems.
Primary researchers: Del Myers
Partners: Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC)
We are examining lightweight peer review techniques in both industrial and open source projects. We use a multi-case study methodology to discover the underlying parameters, structure, and policies involved in conducting software peer reviews.
Primary researcher: Peter Rigby
Visual Data Analysis for InfoVis Novices
Choosel is a framework that supports the creation of web-based information mashup environments. These mashup environments facilitate the flexible recombination of information in different views such as maps, timelines and graph viewers. Users without any programming expertise can remix information using drag and drop interaction and explore data sets. The workspaces (mashups) can be stored and shared among users.
Primary researcher: Lars Grammel
Partners: National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), IBM Centers for Advanced Studies
User Interfaces for Visualization Construction and Coordination
Information visualization is becoming a mainstream technology that is being utilized by information visualization novices – those who analyze data as part of their primary tasks, but who are not necessarily experts in analytic thinking, nor in interpreting and creating visualizations. We aim at providing an empirically grounded understanding of the specific challenges non-expert analysts encounter during visualization construction, and by evaluating cognitive support requirements and design guidelines that stem from this understanding. Specifically, the research goal is to understand how non-expert analysts can be supported during visualization construction and coordination such that the efficiency and effectiveness of the visual data analysis process is improved. Through our research, we hope to contribute to the vision of making InfoVis an everyday tool for non-expert analysts.
Primary researcher: Lars Grammel
Partners: IBM Centers for Advanced Studies
Interactive visualization of Earthquakes with 1,000 or More Casualties
Lars Grammel from the Chisel group has created an interactive visualization of earthquakes with 1,000 or more deaths since 1900 using Choosel components. Check it out!
