Data Visualization Challenges and Opportunities in User-Oriented Application Development

Abstract:

This talk introduces the audience to some of the very real challenges associated with visualizing data from disparate data sources as encountered during the development of real world applications. In addition to the fundamental challenges of dealing with the data and imagery, this talk discusses usability problems encountered while trying to provide interactive and user-friendly visualization tools. At the end of this talk the audience will be aware of some of the pitfalls of data visualization along with tools and techniques to help mitigate them.

There are many sources of variable resolution visualizations of science data available to application developers including NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), however integrating and leveraging visualizations in modern applications faces a number of challenges, including:

- Varying visualized Earth “tile sizes” resulting in challenges merging disparate sources

- Multiple visualization frameworks and toolkits with varying strengths and weaknesses

- Global composite imagery vs. imagery matching EOSDIS granule distribution

- Challenges visualizing geographically overlapping data with different temporal bounds

- User interaction with overlapping or collocated data

- Complex data boundaries and shapes combined with multi-orbit data and polar projections

- Discovering the availability of visualizations and the specific parameters, color palettes, and configurations used to produce them

In addition to discussing the challenges and approaches involved in visualizing disparate data, we will discuss solutions and components we’ll be making available as open source to encourage reuse and accelerate application development.