The aim of the meeting was to bring together those interested in visualization aspects of e-Science so that there could be:
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A shared awareness of the different UK e-Science projects that involve visualization
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The development of some common principles and practice that could usefully be adopted across a range of e-Science projects.
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The creation of a research agenda for visualization in UK e-Science
We were also aiming for the meeting to build a community of visualization practitioners within the UK, a community that could live on after the event and help to promote the UK as a Centre of Excellence in visualization.
There were thirty-one attendees - the list of attendees is included as an appendix.
The opening talk, setting the scene and raising issues for discussion, was given by
Terry Hewitt, Head of Supercomputing, Visualization and e-Science, University of
Manchester.
Short presentations from a range of UK e-Science projects (including some live demos) then followed:
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Reality Grid – Stephen Pickles (University of Manchester)
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Combechem – Sue Lewis (University of Southampton)
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GEM / Geodise / Gyacht – Marc Molinari (University of Southampton)
• gViz – Jason Wood (University of Leeds)
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E-demand – Stuart Charters (University of Durham)
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IXgrid and Op3d-grid – Nigel John (University of Manchester)
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Cosmogrid – Andrew Usher (University of Cambridge)
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ClimatePrediction.com – Jeremy Walton (NAG Ltd)
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CoAKTinG – Simon Buckingham Shum (Open University)
A wider view of two areas was then given:
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Reality Grid – John Brooke (University of Manchester)
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XML for visualization – David Duce (Oxford Brookes University)
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The meeting then broke into working group sessions (see below) before a final wrapup.
The groups were asked to address a number of issues that had been raised by attendees before the event, and to generate up to five key issues for the visualization community - informed by the earlier presentations. Below is a quick summary of some of the issues discussed and opinions formed.
Group 1 – Grid Architectures
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Can interactive visualization be delivered through a Grid portal? Not seen as practical today, other than in batch mode for delivering images or movie files, but browser functionality is getting richer (eg SVG, X3D, Java3D…) so the picture may change.
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Is an OGSA Visualization Library feasible? This seems viable, and is more practical in terms of Grid services than Web services. Key is finding the right level of granularity.
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Need for a Vizier, or Viz Czar, was identified, as a group that tracks the visualization requirements in the UK, establishes best practice and avoids duplication and fragmentation of effort. There is a need for resource brokers for visualization, and brokers for visualization services.
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There are special security issues in visualization, particularly for collaborative visualization where the concept of a ‘group’ is fundamental (shorter-term and lighter weight than a Virtual Organisation).
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Integration of visualization capabilities and Access Grid was seen as important.
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Collaborative visualization fits a peer-to-peer model better than client-server – is this an issue for OGSA to address?
Group 2 – Data Standards
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There is a strong case for a visualization data standard, based on XML as description language.
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There is a clear need for an ontology for visualization in order to allow better human discourse, and to allow automatic processing of visualization data.
What do we mean by a mesh for example, or a grid?
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It is one thing to define a standard data description, but another to have people use it. What is the best way to develop a standard in this area, that people will buy into?
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To address e-Science requirements, the scope needs to extend beyond traditional ‘scivis’ formats, and encompass more general Information
Visualization data structures.
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There is a need for ‘Googus’ – seen as a toolkit approach at higher level than middleware, but not a complete application. For example, we might have a dataflow approach to combining web services, each service providing some visualization function. Data standards will be needed for the various connections. Key is getting correct granularity (see Group 1 also).
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There needs to be an ‘idiot level’ interface for end users of visualization – requiring to support it, a common language for description of services and data, allowing the concept of visualization service agents.
Group 3 – Advanced Interfaces
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Here interactivity is the key issue, with synchronisation required between application and user input.
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Quality of service is important, especially for haptics where high data refresh rates are vital (1kHz) and in remote operation.
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Handling heterogeneous devices in a consistent way is important issue – the laptop on the one hand, the dedicated VR suite on the other. How can this diversity be brought together? Are there new opportunities – eg olfaction?
Generating the right image for the display implies taking rendering decisions late.
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Resource discovery for advanced devices is important. How does a user discover what facilities are available, and how to access them? Examples would be nice!
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Two approaches to ‘Google for Visualization’ were suggested. (Recall that
Google gives pointers to solutions.) First, given some data, eg volume data, the tool would return the web services which would render it. Second, in relation to advanced interfaces, the user could additionally indicate the technology available to them, and the tool would return the most appropriate service, or suggest rendering remotely.
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Need for ontology for advanced devices was proposed.
Group 4 – Human Issues
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Role of background knowledge in interpreting visualizations – people bring domain knowledge to interpreting a visualization, how do we best exploit this, for example in collaborative working? It is an e-science issue when eg statisticians and chemists work together.
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How do analysis and visualization interact? Are they separate, or should they be integrated? Solution is seen as elegant combination at user interface level.
Importance of e-logbooks noted to capture context of a visualization.
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How best to define user requirements? How best can users and visualization experts work together. Solution is to foster visual literacy, perhaps provide community with set of template visualizations (but avoid closing door to new innovative approaches).
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How do we foster good practice? The IEEEVis conference has entertaining but instructive session on ‘Vis Lies’ .
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How do we co-ordinate UK activity better? A difficulty is that scientists will not attend visualization conferences. But visualization people might provide tutorials at science conferences, or computer-support staff events.
Group 5 – Large Data Sets, Visual Area Networking and Computational
Steering
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Lack of standard data formats seen as major inhibitor to progress. The BinX initiative is seen as important in providing interchange of binary format data.
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The bottleneck is the rendering process – we need to be able to do this in parallel but without specialised hardware.
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Resource allocation- we need to co-schedule high performance compute resource, visualization resource and human involvement (for steering).
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Computational steering – should simulation and visualization be seen as distinct?
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Compression of data – SGI Vizserver is effective but proprietary, is
Chromium (see for example, http://www.cs.utah.edu/~cgribble/files/whitepaper.pdf
) a more general solution, can BinX be used?
The closing session included a presentation from John Brooke on the Global Grid
Forum and how people could get involved.
The attendees then returned to their working groups to identify the three most pressing issues for the community to address, in the short, medium and long term.
There was a surprising unanimity between all five groups as to the priorities, and these form a set of recommendations for future activity in the UK e-Science programme, outlined in the next section of this report.
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Short term – The Vizier: There is an immediate need for some task force to have a broad view of visualization activity in the UK (see Group 1 above).
This was seen as a UK-specific activity which would represent a UK view at the GGF level, where a working group activity on visualization might be initiated (there is not a unique visualization group in GGF although there is an activity on Advanced Collaborative Environments). The Vizier would be responsible for the coordination of the following three short-term activities.
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Short term – The Visualization Community: There is an immediate need to build the UK visualization community. As a lightweight approach, there might be a case for a follow up workshop at NeSC, at which a visualization roadmap document was developed (from an initial draft by a workshop steering committee), for buy-in by the community. There should be an e-mail list and a web site. In contrast to the EPSRC Visualization and Virtual Environments
Community Club, which was successful as an agency to brief the community on new developments, we need a more action-oriented approach where the community works collaboratively on projects of common good. This community needs to be inclusive.
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Short term – The Ontology: There is a need to establish an ontology for visualization. The development of this might be undertaken as part of the follow up workshop, but would need ongoing refinement before it could gain credibility.
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Short term – The Repository: There is a need for a shared repository of materials – software resources, datasets, education and training materials. This should ideally be peer reviewed. (The Eurographics and SIGGRAPH
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Education Groups are planning to provide a similar repository and peer review mechanism.)
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Medium term – The Architecture: There is an emerging vision of future visualization systems being created as a set of composable services built in an
OGSA framework, supporting co-allocation of resources. This is a challenging task, but different groups (eg RealityGrid and gViz projects) are heading in this direction and synergy should be exploited. There needs to be two-way flow along the visualization pipeline.
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Medium term – The Standards: In the medium term, we look towards strengthening the UK participation in an international visualization activity, probably through GGF, and working towards international standards for visualization data.
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Medium term – Education: There is a need to improve the education of students of all disciplines in visualization and visual literacy. This work might be progressed through Eurographics and SIGGRAPH Education Groups.
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Long term – The Semantic Visualization World: We envisage integration with Semantic Web technology, for example to enable semantic searches.
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Long term – Visualization Everywhere: We need standards for advanced interfaces to allow us to support highly interactive, heterogeneous, collaborative visualizations on current and emerging technology.
In order to progress this vision, a follow up workshop (probably around May/June
2003) was strongly supported. This would develop the roadmap suggested above, from an initial base document. It would push forward ‘common good’ projects where the community could work together – and visualization in Access Grid was identified as a natural candidate for such a project.
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The attendees at the workshop were:
Prof Nick Avis
John Blair-Fish
Prof Ken Brodlie
John Brooke
Dr Simon Buckingham Shum
Stuart Charters
Dr Martin Connell
Prof David Duce
Dr David Duke
Julian Gallop
Sam Gould
Dr Jens Harting
Terry Hewitt
Dr Nick Holliman
Dr Tom Jackson
Dr Nigel John
Cardiff University
University of Edinburgh
University of Leeds
University of Manchester
Open University
University of Durham
University of Edinburgh
Oxford Brookes University
University of Bath
CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Lab
University of Southampton
Queen Mary
University of Manchester
University of Durham
University of York
University of Manchester
Dr Claire Knight
Prof Susan Lewis
Roy Middleton
Dr Marc Molinari
Dr Ieuan Nicholas
University of Durham
University of Southampton
University of Edinburgh
University of Southampton
Cardiff University
James Osborne
Dr Stephen Pickles
Dr Andrew Porter
Sue Ramsden
Dr Jonathan Roberts
Dr Kevin Stratford
Andrew Usher
Dr Jeremy Walton
University of Hull
University of Manchester
University of Manchester
University of Manchester
University of Kent
University of Edinburgh
University of Cambridge
NAG Ltd
Dr Jason Wood
David Woods
The organising team for the workshop was:
University of Leeds
University of Southampton
Ken Brodlie, John Brooke, David Duce and Stephen Pickles, with local support from
Lee McLeod and Gill Maddy of NeSC.
KWB/JMB/DAD/SMP
18-feb-03
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