Scientific visualization techniques for program visualization

The first part of this work discusses scientific visualization in terms of its pipeline, techniques and applications. This is followed by the analysis of program visualization with respect to program visualization systems. To understand the code structure of an existing program, scientific visualization techniques such as glyphs and orthoslice are investigated in the creation of a graphical model of a program. The second part of this work systematically investigates the characterization of scientific and program data. A Program Scientific Visualization (PSV) model, the primary contribution of this thesis, is developed to reflect a framework for the adopted systematic approach of characterizing scientific and program data. This model provides a possible solution to the scalability and navigation issues that the present program visualization systems are facing. It defines the process of mapping program data to scientific data, which is further complemented with a formalized notation. The approach considered in this thesis is novel. The third part of this work is the application of scientific visualization techniques to program data. The approach is innovative in applying mature scientific visualization techniques to visualize the structure of programs. (Abstract shortened by UMI.