VoVis: A Vocabulary-based Web Visualization Framework

The amount of data in today's digital world is growing day by day. Visualization is considered as the best form of communication because the human brain perceives it much faster than the text data that comprises with thousand of words. Because of the enormous and continuously increasing data, the demand to visualize it is also increasing. Information visualization is a wide research area that covers a broad range of data fields. There are various visualization frameworks, tools and technologies are available in the market to present different data. A visualization framework is a complete package that contains several visualization processing stages i.e. data collection in different formats, data filtration, data mapping, data processing and data visualization. The important goal in visualization is to convey the information of data correctly. This can be achieved by improving the user-friendly data mapping mechanism. The state-of-art solutions lacks several features which are important in visualizing the data. This thesis has four important contributions. First, it enumerates these features by referring available standards and technologies. Second, the feature requirements for a general web Visualization framework are identified. Third, several existing frameworks are analyzed and evaluated based on these requirement set. Fourth, an optimal solution is stated, designed and developed as a vocabulary based visualization visualization (VoVis) framework. In this framework, to improve mapping mechanism and to support a broad range of visualization types, the concept of vocabulary for visualization is introduced and designed. The developed VoVis framework has a vocabulary component (vocabulary and visualization libraries) which uses the standard JavaScript libraries for visualization. The VoVis framework is built as a web-based application which is a modern and emerging technology and well known for low maintainability cost