VisGap - The Gap between Visualization Research and Visualization Software

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Better Information Visualization Software Through Packages for Data Science Ecosystems
(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Henkin, Rafael; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Good software development practices are important factors for the successful translation of visualization research into software. This paper argues for the creation of packages for data science ecosystems, with Python and R as case studies, as a way to employ existing tools and infrastructure towards better information visualization software. The paper describes open practices, sustainability and FAIR software to motivate package development. The ecosystems of Python and R are then reviewed based on general software development aspects and how common features of visualization software, such as rendering and interactivity, are supported. It concludes with the software engineering benefits related to creating packages in Python and R and initiatives to overcome obstacles that may hinder the development of better software.
Beyond the Prototype: Challenges of Long-Term Integration of Visual Analytics in Civic Spaces
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Jasim, Mahmood; Mahyar, Narges; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Despite the recognized benefits of visual analytics systems in supporting data-driven decision-making, their deployment in realworld civic contexts often faces significant barriers. Beyond technical challenges such as resource constraints and development complexity, sociotechnical factors-including organizational hierarchies, misalignment between designers and stakeholders, and concerns around technology adoption hinder their sustained use. In this work, we reflect on our collective experiences of designing, developing, and deploying visual analytics systems in the civic domain and discuss challenges across design and adoption aspects. We emphasize the need for deeper integration strategies, equitable stakeholder engagement, and sustainable implementation frameworks to bridge the gap between research and practice.
Challenges in the Development, Distribution, and Maintenance of Software Visualization Tools in Biology and Medicine
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Shah, Michael D.; Qiu, Sherry; Walter, Thomas; Rushmeier, Holly; Blenman, Kim R.M.; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Software visualizations remain and will continue to serve as an important tool for domain scientists in order to advance, communicate, and investigate science. In this paper, we present our findings on a case study of the challenges involved with specialized visualization software. Through this case study, we provide insights into why building software and tools for scientists is challenging. We provide several recommendations at the end of our work in order to progress forward the ability to improve software quality when developing critical software visualization tools in domains such as biology and medicine. Key Learnings: For tools that require integration and/or implementation of multiple programming languages 1) start early with the development on all target platforms and 2) look for where to reimplement a function rather than bring in code with many extraneous dependencies.
Extensible TensorFlow Implementations of Projection Quality Metrics
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Machado, Alister; Behrisch, Michael; Telea, Alexandru; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Dimensionality Reduction (DR, also called Projection) algorithms enable the exploration of high-dimensional data by generating low-dimensional representations of it - typically 2D or 3D scatterplots. Such representations are designed to map data patterns to visual patterns analyzable by humans. Projections can vary wildly - even for a fixed dataset - depending on technique and hyperparameters chosen and, as such, do not all preserve all data patterns equally well. To assess this, so-called Projection Quality Metrics (PQMs) are used. However, the ever-growing number of Projection Quality Metrics has led to fragmented implementations which hinder their easy reuse, leading in turn to unequal adoption and inconsistent implementations. In this work, we propose a TensorFlow-based library of PQMs, improving the previous state of the art in terms of ergonomics, extensibility, and computational scalability. We discuss our improvements and elicit areas where the gap between implementation and research is significant in the area of Projection Quality Metrics, pointing to avenues for future work in developing better PQM libraries that aim to fill this gap.
Framing the Challenges of Operational and Domain Usage of Volume Visualization Methods in Ocean Science
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Bemis, Karen; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
Several case studies are used to explore why the adoption of visualization software, especially for the visualization of 3D timevarying ocean data, has lagged behind the development of visualization techniques. The development history of the Silver and Wang feature tracking for time-varying 3D volume data highlights the challenges of decadal scale development and support. The experiences of supporting operational use of processing and visualization for the COVIS oceanographic instrument suggest packaging and version control are far more critical than most users or developers in the ocean science community realize. Initial efforts to package feature extraction and skeletonization for a domain scientist lead to the realization that ease of configuration is critical to supporting scientific exploration, experimentation, and illustration. A consideration of the history of marching cubes focuses attention on the gap between the development of methods and the dissemination of fully mature software. These challenges can be framed succinctly as Discovery, Relevance, Adaptability for Ease of Usage, Input/Output Flexibility, Reliability, and Sustainability. The lessons learned here suggest the need for a more sustainable funding model, strong expectations for code dissemination and documentation, attention to the needs of users especially domain scientists, and greater visibility of code development efforts to end users.
From Research Topic to Industrial Practice: An Experience Report
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Gospodnetic, Petra; Rauhut, Markus; Hagen, Hans; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
Continuous technological progress requires both research and industry to work together. It is a necessity which cannot and should not be avoided. However, due to different interests of the two, it is often accompanied by various challenges. The inability to foresee and overcome the challenges can greatly impact the quality of collaboration results and thus chances of such results being used further by the industry. In this paper, we provide background on the topic and emphasize frequently discussed points. Focus of the work are industry-academia collaborations in applied computer science research such as visualization. For that purpose, a set of requirements is recognized and provided for both industry and research community. Further, we provide an overview of challenges recognized over years of experience from working in industry-academia collaborations. Together, the challenges indicate the gap between the industry and research which is inherently transferred further onto results of collaborative research. Finally, we discuss various possibilities for both industry and research to reduce the gap.
The Gap between Visualization Research and Visualization Software in High-Performance Computing Center
(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Dang, Tommy; Nguyen, Ngan; Hass, Jon; Li, Jie; Chen, Yong; Sill, Alan; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
Visualizing and monitoring high-performance computing centers is a daunting task due to the systems' complex and dynamic nature. Moreover, different users may have different requirements and needs. For example, computer scientists carry out data analysis as batch jobs using various models, configurations, and parameters, and they often need to manage jobs. System administrators need to monitor and manage the system constantly. In this paper, we discuss the gap between visual monitoring research and practical applicability. We will start with the general requirements for managing high-performance computing centers and then share the experiences working with academic and industrial experts in this domain.
How the Deprecation of Java Applets Affected Online Visualization Frameworks - A Case Study
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Skrodzki, Martin; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
The JavaView visualization framework was designed at the end of the 1990s as a software that provides-among other services- easy, interactive geometry visualizations on web pages.We discuss how this and other design goals were met and present several applications to highlight the contemporary use-cases of the framework. However, as JavaView's easy web exports was based on Java Applets, the deprecation of this technology disabled one main functionality of the software. The remainder of the article uses JavaView as an example to highlight the effects of changes in the underlying programming language on a visualization toolkit. We discuss possible reactions of software to such challenges, where the JavaView framework serves as an example to illustrate development decisions. These discussions are guided by the broader, underlying question as to how long it is sensible to maintain a software.
InfraVis - The Swedish Research Infrastructure for Visualization Support
(The Eurographics Association, 2025) Weinkauf, Tino; Romero, Mario; Besançon, Lonni; Ahlstedt, Jonas; Berendt, Filip; Billger, Monica; Danielsson, Karin; Davies, Melvyn B.; Filipsson, Helena; Gelfgren, Stefan; Kerren, Andreas; Larsson, Emanuel; Latino, Fabio; Liliequist, Evelina; Nyström, Ingela; Paulsson, Kajsa; Podkorytova, Maria; Pirzamanbein, Behnaz; Sjöström, Mårten; Sopasakis, Alexandros; Thuresson, Björn; Westin, Jonathan; Ynnerman, Anders; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Essentially all academic research of today relies on analysis of data from a wide range of sources. Several underpinning, and rapidly developing, technologies are supporting the analysis of this data. Visualization serves as an interface to this ecosystem of tools and methods and integrates them into environments supporting scientific workflows, effectively sharing cognitive load between computers and humans. There is, however, a gap between the state-of-the-art in visual data analysis and current wide-spread academic practice. Support for the introduction of new, improved and tailored, visual data analysis environments thus has the potential to address challenges involving large and complex data, creating competitive advantages for researchers. To fill the gap and capitalize on this opportunity, the InfraVis initiative has been created in Sweden with the mission to operate an infrastructure consisting of visualization experts, software solutions, and access to high-end visualization laboratories. Users of InfraVis are offered assistance through a national helpdesk with rapid response times as well as more in-depth projects addressing specific data and software challenges. InfraVis provides software solutions based on development within connected research groups, curation of international software and best practice, and user training in the form of courses, seminars and on-line documentation. To build an infrastructure with national coverage, we have pooled together nine visualization environments in Sweden interconnected in a nodal structure. The nodes are hosted in proximity to research environments in visualization, which enables direct access to the research front as well as to state-of-art facilities. The governance structure of InfraVis is based on the leading researchers in visualization in Sweden as well as an international advisory board.
The Lack of Specialized Symbology and Visual Interaction Design Guidance for Sub-Sea Military Operations
(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Walsh, Gareth; Sindlev Andersen, Nicklas; Stoianov, Nikolai; Jänicke, Stefan; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
This paper addresses the lack and need for specialized and visually effective interaction design guidance for sub-sea military operations. We identify gaps in the implementation of best practice visualization techniques, building upon our recently published survey on visual interfaces used in military decision support systems. Our analysis focuses on the current NATO symbology standard and several sub-sea military frontend systems to identify deficiencies and their underlying causes. Such origins of deficiencies include inadequate design consideration of environmental conditions, as well as incomplete hardware and software requirements for sub-sea conditions. While many such gaps exist, for the purposes of this paper, we narrow our focus to exploring the potential for a new sub-sea symbology for the maritime domain, drawing from insights gained and developed through our participation in the EDIDP (European Defence Industrial Development Programme) project CUIIS (Comprehensive Underwater Intervention Information System). We propose extending existing NATO military standards by creating a comprehensive framework for a new sub-sea symbology and visual interaction design. This framework includes a set of semiotic communication symbols for military divers, which can easily be combined based on the most common messages required for effective communication between command and military divers. This paper concludes by highlighting the opportunities for improvement in NATO Military Symbology for sub-sea military operations.
Lessons Learned from Large Data Visualization Software Development for the K computer
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Nonaka, Jorji; Sakamoto, Naohisa; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
High Performance Computing (HPC) always had a close relationship with visualization as we can remember the landmark report on ''Visualization in Scientific Computing'', which was credited to have coined the term Scientific Visualization (SciVis). K computer, a Japanese flagship HPC system, appeared in 2011 as the most powerful supercomputer in the Top500 list, and as other similar HPC systems in that ranking, it was designed to enable ''Grand Challenge'' scientific computing with unprecedented scale and size. RIKEN Center for Computational Science (RIKEN R-CCS) operated and provided the K computer's computational resources to the HPC community for almost 8 years until it was decommissioned in 2019. Considering that most of the scientific computing results were publicly presented in the form of visual images and movies, we can infer that the SciVis was widely applied for assisting the domain scientists with their end-to-end scientific computing workflows. In addition to the traditional visualization applications, various others large data visualization software development were conducted in order to tackle the increased size and amount of the simulation outputs. RIKEN R-CCS participated in some of these development and deployment dealing with several environmental and human factors. Although we have no precise statistics regarding the visualization software usage, in this paper, we would like to present some findings and lessons learned from the large data visualization software development in the K computer environment.
Lessons Learnt from Developing Visual Analytics Applications for Adaptive Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Raidou, Renata Georgia; Furmanová, Katarína; Grossmann, Nicolas; Casares-Magaz, Oscar; Moiseenko, Vitali; Einck, John P.; Gröller, Eduard; Muren, Ludvig P.; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
In radiotherapy (RT), changes in patient anatomy throughout the treatment period might lead to deviations between planned and delivered dose, resulting in inadequate tumor coverage and/or overradiation of healthy tissues. Adapting the treatment to account for anatomical changes is anticipated to enable higher precision and less toxicity to healthy tissues. Corresponding tools for the in-depth exploration and analysis of available clinical cohort data were not available before our work. In this paper, we discuss our on-going process of introducing visual analytics to the domain of adaptive RT for prostate cancer. This has been done through the design of three visual analytics applications, built for clinical researchers working on the deployment of robust RT treatment strategies. We focus on describing our iterative design process, and we discuss the lessons learnt from our fruitful collaboration with clinical domain experts and industry, interested in integrating our prototypes into their workflow.
Many Types of Design Needed for Effective Visualizations
(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Brath, Richard; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
For effective visualizations, there are many types of design to consider. Visualization design focuses on core theory of tasks, data and visual encodings. Workflow design, user interface design and graphic design all contribute to a successful visualizations. All design aspects range from initial design exploration to iterative design refinement. Guidelines can help, but have limitations. Examples illustrate visualization issues arising from missing domain knowledge, facilitating alternative designs, refining labeling, layouts to aid workflow, frankenvis, 3D timeseries, and ineffective design collaboration.
OSPRay Studio: Enabling Multi-Workflow Visualizations with OSPRay
(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Sharma, Isha; DeMarle, Dave; Hota, Alok; Cherniak, Bruce; Günther, Johannes; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
There are a number of established production ready scientific visualization tools in the field today including ParaView [Aya15], VisIt [CBW*11] and EnSight [Ans]. However, often they come with well defined core feature sets, established visual appearance characteristics, and steep learning curves – especially for software developers. They have vast differences with other rendering applications such as Blender or Maya (known for their high-quality rendering and 3D content creation uses) in terms of design and features, and have over time become monolithic in nature with difficult to customize workflows [UFK*89]. As such a multi-purpose visualization solution for Scientific, Product, Architectural and Medical Visualization is hard to find. This is a gap we identify; and with this paper we present the idea of a minimal application called OSPRay Studio, with a flexible design to support high-quality physically-based rendering and scientific visualization workflows. We will describe the motivation, design philosophy, features, targeted use-cases and real-world applications along with future opportunities for this application.
Participatory Visualization Design as an Approach to Minimize the Gap between Research and Application
(The Eurographics Association, 2020) Jänicke, Stefan; Kaur, Pawandeep; Kuzmicki, Pawel; Schmidt, Johanna; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
Despite acceptance in our field, many sophisticated visualization projects suffer from failing acceptance by the targeted audience. Though the reasons for this circumstance might be manifold, we argue that they align with the typical pitfalls of software development. On the one hand, stakeholders are often not or only marginally integrated in the visualization design process, on the other hand, the goals we follow as visualization scholars do often not align with the goals of the stakeholders, reducing them to data deliverers. We provide case studies reporting on finished and ongoing projects following a participatory design approach. Those projects are initiated by the needs from users in digital humanities, biodiversity research, sports analysis and data science, and our results indicate that participatory visualization design leads to mutual benefits, reducing the gap between research and application in the targeted domain.
Performance Improvements of Poincaré Analysis for Exascale Fusion Simulations
(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Pugmire, David; Choi, Jong Y.; Klasky, Scott; Moreland, Kenneth; Suchyta, Eric; Athawale, Tushar M.; Wang, Zhe; Chang, Choong-Seock; Ku, Seung-Hoe; Hager, Robert; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Understanding the time-varying magnetic field in a fusion device is critical for the successful design and construction of clean-burning fusion power plants. Poincaré analysis provides a powerful method for the visualization of magnetic fields in fusion devices. However, Poincaré plots can be very computationally expensive making it impractical, for example, to generate these plots in situ during a simulation. In this short paper, we describe a collaboration among computer science and physics researchers to develop a new Poincaré tool that provides a significant reduction in the time to generate analysis results.
Personal Experiences of Providing and Using Research Prototypes
(The Eurographics Association, 2022) Isenberg, Tobias; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
I report on my personal experiences as a student, researcher, supervisor, and collaborator about providing and using research prototype software (i. e., demos). Based on an analysis of my own research activities in computer graphics and visualization, I discuss problems of providing demo software for our own projects, problems of running such software years after the release, and problems of accessing such prototypes after several years. I conclude that both source code and demos should be encouraged, provide some recommendations on how to do the latter, and call for a more active support of sharing this part of a scientific contribution within the Open Science movement.
Physical Traces and Digital Stories: Exploring the Connections Between Forensics and Visualization
(The Eurographics Association, 2022) Schetinger, Victor; Salisu, Saminu; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Forensics, or forensic science, deals with the analysis of evidence for investigation. It is a a wide and strongly interdisciplinary field that needs the coupling of research, practice, and communication to be useful. New techniques have to be constantly developed and applied in the field to solve social conflicts. Recent work suggests, however, that there are many gaps in this coupling, and we argue that there are lessons to be learned from them. Among the difficulties faced by forensics are the management of its interdisciplinarity and over-specialization, and the effective adoption of new research, which are also pressing for the visualization community. In this paper, we bring a gentle introduction to the challenges of forensics with a focus on its digital forms and explore connections to visualization. We believe these connections can be leveraged to further the development of both fields, and particularly that visualization and interaction are critical for the forensics process.
Property-Based Testing for Visualization Development
(The Eurographics Association, 2021) Stegmaier, Michael; Engel, Dominik; Olbrich, Jannik; Ropinski, Timo; Tichy, Matthias; Gillmann, Christina and Krone, Michael and Reina, Guido and Wischgoll, Thomas
As the testing capabilities of current visualization software fail to cover a large space of rendering parameters, we propose to use property-based testing to automatically generate a large set of tests with different parameter sets. By comparing the resulting renderings for pairs of different parameters, we can verify certain effects to be expected in the rendering upon change of a specific parameter. This allows for testing visualization algorithms with a large coverage of rendering parameters. Our proposed approach can also be used in a test-driven manner, meaning the tests can be defined alongside the actual algorithm. Lastly, we show that by integrating the proposed concepts into the existing regression testing pipeline of Inviwo, we can execute the property-based testing process in a continuous integration setup. To demonstrate our approach, we describe use cases where property-based testing can help to find errors during visualization development.
Reflections on the Developments of Visual Analytics Systems for the K Computer System Log Data
(The Eurographics Association, 2023) Nonaka, Jorji; Fujita, Keijiro; Fujiwara, Takanori; Sakamoto, Naohisa; Yamamoto, Keiji; Terai, Masaaki; Tsukamoto, Toshiyuki; Shoji, Fumiyoshi; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Wischgoll, Thomas
Flagship-class high-performance computing (HPC) systems, also known as supercomputers, are large, complex systems that require particular attention for continuous and long-term stable operations. The K computer was a Japanese flagship-class supercomputer ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the Top500 ranking when it first appeared. It was composed of more than eighty thousand compute nodes and consumed more than 12 MW when running the LINPACK benchmark for the Top500 submission. A combined power substation, with a natural gas co-generation system (CGS), was used for the power supply, and also a large air/water cooling facility was used to extract the massive heat generated from this HPC system. During the years of its regular operation, a large log dataset has been generated from the K computer system and its facility, and several visual analytics systems have been developed to better understand the K computer's behavior during the operation as well as the probable correlation of operational temperature with the critical hardware failures. In this paper, we will reflect on these visual analytics systems, mainly developed by graduate students, intended to be used by different types of end users on the HPC site. In addition, we will discuss the importance of collaborative development involving the end users, and also the importance of technical people in the middle for assisting in the deployment and possible continuation of the developed systems.

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